*** Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make - 14 New Ways Thatthe Government Is Watching You - End of the American Dream

If you live in the United States today, you need to understandthat your privacy is being constantly eroded. Our world is goingcrazy, government paranoia is off the charts and law enforcementauthorities have become absolutely obsessed with watching us,listening to us, tracking us, recording us, compiling informationon all of us and getting us all to spy on one another. If you doubtthat we are rapidly getting to the point where the government willmonitor every breath you take and every move you make, just read therest of this article. The truth is that the government is watchingyou more closely than ever, and they are spending billions uponbillions of dollars to enhance their surveillance capabilitieseven further. If our society stays on this current path, we willeventually have zero privacy left. At this point, it is not toohard to imagine a society where we will not be able to say anything,buy anything, sell anything, assemble with others or even leave ourhomes without government permission. We truly are descending intoa dystopian nightmare and the American people had better wake up.

Sadly, most people living in the United States and in Europe do notrealize what is happening. Most of them think that everything isjust fine. The "Big Brother control grid" that is being constructedall over the western world squeezes all of us just a little bittighter every single day, and most people don't even feel it.

But when you step back and take a look at the big picture, it trulyis horrifying.

The following are 14 new ways that the government is watching you....

#1 In many areas of the United States today, you will be arrestedif you do not produce proper identification for the police. In theold days, "your papers please" was a phrase that we used to useto mock the tyranny of Nazi Germany. But now all of us are beingrequired to be able to produce "our papers" for law enforcementauthorities at any time.

For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zuckerwas recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hoursjust because she could not produce any identification for police.

#2 The federal government has decided that what you and Ishare with one another on Facebook and on Twitter could be athreat to national security. According to a recent AssociatedPress article, the Department of Homeland Security will soon be"gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook forlaw enforcement purposes".

Other law enforcement agencies are getting into the act as well. Forexample, the NYPD recently created a special "social media" unitdedicated to looking for criminals on social media networks suchas Facebook and Twitter.

#3 New high-tech street lights that are being funded by the federalgovernment and that are being installed all over the nation can alsobe used as surveillance cameras, can be used by the DHS to make"security announcements" and can even be used to record personalconversations. The following is from a recent article by Paul JosephWatson for Infowars.com....

Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed inAmerican cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making "securityannouncements" and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they arealso capable of "recording conversations," bringing the potentialprivacy threat posed by 'Intellistreets' to a whole new level.

#4 More than a million hotel television sets all over America arenow broadcasting propaganda messages from the Department of HomelandSecurity promoting the "See Something, Say Something" campaign. Inessence, the federal government wants all of us to become"informants" and to start spying on one another constantly. Thefollowing comes from an article posted by USA Today....

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel televisionsets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotelsin the USA will show a short public service announcement fromDHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant andcall law enforcement if they witness something suspicious duringtheir travels.

#5 The FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programsall over the United States. The following comes from a recentarticle by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com....

If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might berecorded by the FBI.

The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company torecord as much radio news and talk programming as it can find onthe Internet.

The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves,but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.

Potential evidence of what?

This is very creepy. Why is the FBI so interested in what is beingsaid during Internet talk radio programs?

#6 TSA VIPR teams are now conducting random inspections at busstations and on interstate highways all over the United States. Forexample, the following comes from a local news report down inTennessee....

You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms atthe airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fightterrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on anairplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Departmentof Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at fiveweigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

#7 Thermal imaging face scanners are becoming much moresophisticated. Law enforcement authorities in the western world aregetting very excited about "pre-crime" tools such as this that willenable them to "prevent crimes" before they happen. The followingis from a recent BBC News article....

A sophisticated new camera system can detect lies just by watchingour faces as we talk, experts say.

The computerised system uses a simple video camera, a high-resolutionthermal imaging sensor and a suite of algorithms.

Researchers say the system could be a powerful aid to securityservices.

But face scanners are not just a tool that will be used in thefuture. The truth is that face scanners are being used all overthe United States right now. The following comes from an articleposted on Singularity Hub....

Law enforcement continues to adopt new technologies in an effort tomake their jobs easier and keep us safer. The latest gizmo attachesto officers' iPhones and turns them into biometric face scanners. Thescanners have already been street tested in Massachusetts. Prettysoon cops all across the US will be using them to ID suspects.

Before long, technology like this will be all over America. In fact,the FBI has announced that it will be activating a "nationwidefacial recognition service" in January.

#8 Another "pre-crime" technology currently being tested by theU.S. Department of Homeland Security is The Future AttributeScreening Technology (FAST) program. The following description ofthis new program comes from an article in the London Telegraph....

Using cameras and sensors the "pre-crime" system measures and trackschanges in a person's body movements, the pitch of their voice andthe rhythm of their speech.

It also monitors breathing patterns, eye movements, blink rate andalterations in body heat, which are used to assess an individual'slikelihood to commit a crime.

The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) programme is alreadybeing tested on a group of government employees who volunteered toact as guinea pigs.

Do you want government officials to pull you aside and interrogateyou just because you are feeling a little bit nervous one particularday?

#9 Sadly, "pre-crime" technology is even being used on ourchildren. The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice hasannounced that it will begin using analysis software to predictcrime by young delinquents and will place "potential offenders"in specific prevention and education programs.

How soon will it be before this type of things is applied to adults?

#10 Our children are being programmed to accept the fact thatthey will be watched and monitored constantly. For example, theU.S. Department of Agriculture is spending large amounts of moneyto install surveillance cameras in the cafeterias of public schoolsall across the nation so that government control freaks can closelymonitor what our children are eating.

#11 The U.S. government is also increasingly using "polls" and"surveys" as tools to gather information about all of us. In previousarticles, I have noted how government authorities seems particularlyinterested in our children. According to Mike Adams of Natural News,the CDC is starting to call parents all over the U.S. to questionthem about the vaccination status of their children....

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which has been comprehensivelyexposed as a vaccine propaganda organization promoting the interestsof drug companies, is now engaged in a household surveillance programthat involves calling U.S. households and intimidating parents intoproducing child immunization records. As part of what it deems aNational Immunization Survey(NIS), the CDC is sending letters toU.S. households, alerting them that they will be called by "NORCat the University of Chicago" and that households should "have yourchild's immunization records handy when answering our questions."

You can see a copy of the letter that the CDC has been sending outto selected parents right here.

#12 As I have written about previously, a very disturbing documentthat Oath Keepers has obtained shows that the FBI is now instructingstore owners to report many new forms of "suspicious activity" tothem. According to the document, "suspicious activity" now includesthe following....

According to a report on WorldNetDaily, this document is part of a"series of brochures" that will be distributed "to farm supplystores, gun shops, military surplus stores and even hotels andmotels."

#13 In some areas of the country, law enforcement authorities arepulling data out of cell phones for no reason whatsoever. Accordingto the ACLU, state police in Michigan are now using "extractiondevices" to download data from the cell phones of motorists thatthey pull over. This is taking happening even if the motorists thatare pulled over are not accused of doing anything wrong.

The following is how a recent article on CNET News described thecapabilities of these "extraction devices"....

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download textmessages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cellphones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work withdifferent models and can even bypass security passwords and accesssome information.

#14 The government can spy on us and record our conversationsseemingly without any limitation, but in many areas of the countryit has become illegal to watch them or record them in public. Forexample, one 21-year-old man down in Florida was recently arrestedfor trying to document a confrontation that he was having withpolice on his iPhone. But if we can't record them, how can we proveour side of the story in court?

America is becoming a much different place.

Our privacy is being eroded in thousands of different ways.

National governments and big corporations know far more about youthan you probably ever would imagine.

Yes, there will always be "security threats", but we should nothave to throw away any of our rights in order to be "safe".

America is supposed to be about liberty and freedom.

America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home ofthe brave.

If given the choice between living in "1984" and living in "1776",I know what my choice would be.

I would choose 1776.

I would choose liberty and freedom even if it meant that the worldaround me was a little bit less "safe".

When I read a story yesterday about an 89-year-old womanbeing water-boarded by nursing home staff over an argumentabout ice cream, I knew something terrible was amiss acrossthe American landscape. Spontaneous acts of tyranny havebeen cropping up lately like cancer tumors: a food tyrant inNevada raids a farm picnic and orders everyone to destroytheir food (http://www.naturalnews.com/034125_f...);student protesters in California get pepper-sprayed bythuggish cops who clearly enjoy causing pain and suffering(http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/_ne...); and now nursing homestaffers torture their own resident using techniques borrowed fromGuantanamo Bay (http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2011/11...).

I watched all this with a sense of sadness and disgrace for thehuman race. And then a realization hit me like a sledgehammer...

People are only following by example These random acts of tyrannyaren't really random acts at all. They are the infantile acting-outof behaviors the childish American public has witnessed beingdemonstrated by their "leaders." The TSA sexually molesting airtravelers isn't just a violation of fundamental human rights --it's also a demonstration to the mindless masses that this is now"normal" behavior in society, you see.

So as the masses observe Big Government reaching down their ownpants, they now get the message that it's okay to sexually molestlittle boys at sports stadiums, or that it's okay to take childrenaway from parents through C.P.S. and then rape them as part ofchild relocation "processing" procedures.

When the American people see George Bush set up secret militaryprisons and condone waterboarding torture techniques, they calledfor Obama to stop the practice. Obama promised he would, and thennot long after becoming President, he expanded Gitmo and actuallypresided over an increase in funding for the military and all itssecret torture facilities.

The message to the American people? If Obama supports it, thentorture must be okay. After all, he won a Nobel Peace Prize, so"peace" must be something that can be achieved through torture. Thus,we should not be at all surprised when an 89-year-old woman getswater-boarded in a nursing home. After all, those staffers are onlydoing to her what they've watched the U.S. leaders do to other humanbeings, too. (And yet, for some reason, the nursing home staff werearrested while all the high-level government operatives who engagein the exact same torture techniques are never even questioned...)

This phenomenon of everyday American people mirroring the behaviorof federal "authorities" who act as tyrants needed a name, and asI began to ponder this issue, the name came to me in a flash:

I'm calling this phenomenon Trickle-Down Tyranny.

Trickle-Down TyrannyJust as children mimic the actions of their parents, the childishminds of the insecure (and fear-pummeled) mainstream masses alsomimic the actions of their parental role models. To many Americans --and especially those of a more liberal mindset -- government takeson the role of their parents. The government is supposed to tellyou what to eat, what to buy, what to believe and of course howto express your patriotism when needed to justify the latest warlaunched by a Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning warmonger. Government is the"authority" and the problem solver in the lives of these people. Sonaturally, in their childish mindset they seek to replicate thebehaviors their parental role models are openly exhibiting.

Here's how this looks on the street: Your average city policeofficer is a wannabe tyrant who now, by watching the criminalityof the federal government, feels he has permission to engage inthe same tactics of intimidation and arrogance in ruling over thepublic (rather than serving to protect them). That's why so manybig-city police officers have recently morphed into paramilitaryjack-booted thugs; dressing in black, unlawfully arresting peoplefor no justifiable reason, tasering innocent victims in wheelchairs,and generally acting out what is essentially a childish reflection ofthe very same tyranny they witness being demonstrated by high-leveltyrants in Washington D.C.

The FBI, for its part, is busy actually masterminding the verysame "terror plots" that it then magically "prevents" with greatfanfare. As recently exposed in The Guardian (and other newspapers),the FBI actually develops terror plots, provides the plans, weapons,funding, motivation and equipment necessary for these "terrorists" tocarry out those plots (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/201...). Thisis a whole lot like playing a "big-boy" version of Cowboys andIndians, where all the scenarios are completely fabricated merelyfor the purpose of playing games as a source of entertainment.

Trickle-Down Tyranny is also now being seen in local schools,where "zero-tolerance" rules get children kicked out of thepublic education system for merely bringing a butter knife intheir home-packed lunch, for example. Or a child caught with anaspirin tablet is labeled a "drug abuser" and condemned to specialremediation classes.

The tyrants are everywhere in American society now Think aboutthe tyrants that have now descended upon you in your own life-- the tyrant down at the DMV, the tyrant dog license enforcer,the tyrant building inspector and the tyrant food service worker,also sometimes known as "soup Nazi."

When you really think about it, there are tyrants everywhere now inAmerican culture. The fabric of fear and terror is being woven intothat fabric with every "the threat level is now orange" alert put outby George Bush, or every "spy on your neighbors" message broadcastby the ogre of offensive tyrants, DHS head Janet Napolitano.

What these people claim to be doing -- "stopping terrorism!" -- palesin comparison to what they're really doing: setting examples to befollowed by every single person across America who finds himselfor herself in a position of authority. We'll just ALL be tyrants!

Terrorizing innocents is now politically correct behavior Throughits moronic (and completely fabricated) war on terror, the nationalleadership in the USA has made it politically correct to terrorizeanyone over whom you exercise power. If you're a librarian, youcan terrorize little children over past-due books (that is, ifchildren actually read books at all anymore). If you're a septic tankinspector, you can terrorize people over the layout of their septicpipes. If you're a doctor, you can terrorize people over flu shotsand chemotherapy, all being aggressively pushed with the very samefear tactics now used at the highest levels of national government.

Trickle-down tyranny happens because the political leadersof America have broadcast a message across the nation thatterrorizing innocent people is not merely okay, but downrightpatriotic! Anyone who says they're not going along with allthe terror nonsense, the spy-on-your-neighbor paranoia and the"worship-your-imperialist-government" cultism is immediatelybranded an "extremist." It's now "extreme," you see, to not believein torture and home-grown terror as a way to keep the sheeple inline. "Extremism" is now defined as opening your eyes, asking somecommonsense questions, and refusing to follow the hypnotized massesas they are marched off a high cliff by the globalist populationcontrollers.

Merely thinking for yourself, it turns out, is now "extreme." It'sa brave new world after all, I suppose.

Fear and paranoia is being marketed to the public in an attempt totransform the citizenry into a grand spy ring

The social acceptance of spying on your neighbors and promoting fearhas reached a new fervor across America, very nearly reflectingthat of Nazi Germany in the late 1930's. It's now okay to call911 on somebody merely because they happen to be writing somethingdown on a scrap of paper in a public park (that's one of the signsof possible terrorism, according to ludicrous DHS public servicevideos that only breed paranoid thinking). It's now okay to spy oneveryone around you and secretly observe them to see what they'redoing. It's now your duty to watch over every scrap of luggage atthe airport and start screaming about terror threats if some poorsap walks more than 10 feet away from his bags for a few seconds.

Recently, East Carolina University was thrust into a state of "lockdown" for 3 hours after some spy-on-your-neighbor citizens reporteda man walking around with an "assault rifle." That assault rifle,of course, turned out to be nothing more than a black umbrella(http://www.startribune.com/nation/1...).

But this is the level of outrageous hallucinations and totallunatic paranoia that has been unleashed on the American peopletoday by a fear-mongering, imperialist government which worshipsfear and terror with almost cult-like zealousness. And they callconspiracy theorists paranoid? Maybe they should look in the mirrorsometime... no well-informed conspiracy investigator would evermistake an umbrella for an assault rifle in broad daylight.

The antidote is Trickle-Up Liberty Fortunately, there's a readysolution to all this. The antidote to Trickle-Down Tyranny isTrickle-Up Liberty... also known as "grassroots People power." Thisis what happens when ordinary, everyday citizens realize that allgovernment power comes from the People and that government is theservant of the People, not the other way around.

So they take to the streets and protest. They take their money outof the accounts of globalist banks. They stop buying GMOs. Theyfight against water fluoride in their local towns. They spread theword about Ron Paul. Trickle-Up Liberty is so powerful that it willsooner or later overcome Trickle-Down Tyranny... but only if enoughpeople actually remember what liberty feels like.

That's why, as the editor of NaturalNews, I urge you to practiceliberty in everything you do. Don't settle for tyranny when you caninsist on liberty! After all, the Bill of Rights guarantees you anumber of extremely important rights, many of which are now beingquickly eroded. Stand up for restoring those rights and you willempower the phenomenon of Trickle-Up Liberty (grassroots liberty),which is the ultimate solution against Trickle-Down Tyranny.

You can also defend liberty by practicing common courtesy (and commonsense) in your own positions of power. Don't terrorize people justbecause you can. Exercise common human decency and compassion forthose who deserve your assistance. When you practice random acts ofkindness, you alter the entire emotional landscape across America,replacing fear with kindness. Replacing terror with confidence.

If corporate CEOs would practice this, then... well, mostcorporations would probably go out of business because they'remostly in the business of screwing people over for a profit. "Thereis no such thing as a victimless billionaire," remember. That levelof wealth accumulation simply doesn't happen without taking fromothers in the process.

Bush and Blair found guilty of war crimes for Iraq attack A tribunalin Malaysia applies the Nuremberg Principles to brand the twoleaders as war criminals - Glenn Greenwald

A tribunal in Malaysia, spearheaded by that nation's former PrimeMinister, yesterday found George Bush and Tony Blair guiltyof "crimes against peace" and other war crimes for their 2003aggressive attack on Iraq, as well as fabricating pretexts usedto justify the attack. The seven-member Kuala Lumpur War CrimesTribunal - which featured an American law professor as one ofits chief prosecutors - has no formal enforcement power, but wasmodeled after a 1967 tribunal in Sweden and Denmark that found theU.S. guilty of a war of aggression in Vietnam, and, even more so,after the U.S.-led Nuremberg Tribunal held after World War II. Justas the U.S. steadfastly ignored the 1967 tribunal on Vietnam, Bushand Blair both ignored the summons sent to them and thus were triedin absentia.

The tribunal ruled that Bush and Blair's name should be entered ina register of war criminals, urged that they be recognized as suchunder the Rome Statute, and will also petition the InternationalCriminal Court to proceed with binding charges. Such efforts arelikely to be futile, but one Malaysian lawyer explained the motivesof the tribunal to The Associated Press: "For these people who havebeen immune from prosecution, we want to put them on trial in thisforum to prove that they committed war crimes." In other words,because their own nations refuse to hold them accountable and canuse their power to prevent international bodies from doing so, thetribunal wanted at least formal legal recognition of these war crimesto be recorded and the evidence of their guilt assembled. That's thesame reason a separate panel of this tribunal will hold hearingslater this year on charges of torture against Dick Cheney, DonaldRumsfeld and others.

Here's what I find striking about this. Virtually every Seriouspolitical and media elite in America, by definition, would scoff atthis tribunal; few things are considered more fringe or ludicrousthan the notion that George Bush and Tony Blair should be punishedas war criminals just because they aggressively attacked anothernation and caused the deaths of at least 150,000 innocent peopleand the displacement of millions more. But the only thing thisMalaysian tribunal is doing is applying the clear principles ofthe Nuremberg Tribunal as enunciated by lead prosecutor and formerU.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson in his Opening and ClosingStatements at Nuremberg:

The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holdsthem all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reasonfor international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact. . . .

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners representsinister influences that will lurk in the world long after theirbodies have returned to dust. . . . . And let me make clear thatwhile this law is first applied against German aggressors, the lawincludes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemnaggression by any other nations, including those which sit herenow in judgment.

The "kingpin" crime of the German defendants was not genocide orethnic cleansing, but rather "the plot for aggressive war," and theonly way that the Nuremberg Tribunal will "serve a useful purpose"is if it applies equally in the future to "aggression by any othernations, including those which sit here now in judgment." Who do youthink history will (and should) look more favorably upon? Those inthis Kuala Lumpur tribunal who objected to the heinous war crime thatis the attack on Iraq and attempted to hold the responsible leadersaccountable under the Nuremberg principles, or those in America andBritain who mocked those efforts (when they weren't ignoring them)and demanded that they and their leaders be fully exempted from theprinciples they imposed and decreed as universal after World War II?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan, who yesterday expressed angry bafflementover the fact that many liberals do not swoon for President Obama theway Jon Chait does, today noted that the U.S. under Obama imposeseven less accountability for abuse of power and war crimes thandoes Bahrain:

Bahrain's Sunni government promised "no immunity" for anyonesuspected of abuses and said it would propose creating a permanenthuman rights watchdog commission. "All those who have broken the lawor ignored lawful orders and instructions will be held accountable,"said a government statement, which says the report acknowledgesthat the "systematic practice of mistreatment" ended shortly aftermartial law was repealed on June 1.

Kidnapping and Ransom Rampant in the US - Jeff BerwickThe Dollar Vigilante

The US, by a wide margin, is the world leader in kidnapping and thekidnappers are becoming more predatory and beginning to demand higherransoms as the economic environment in the US continues to decline.

In 2008 alone, 182,422 individuals, were either accosted by armedcriminals and often-times attacked in their own houses, takenand then put in cages throughout the US. While 16,965 of them mayhave deserved to be kidnapped, 165,457 of them, or 90.7%, had doneanything violent to anybody.

A chart shows the total amount kidnapped per country, showing theUS is by far the largest of any country on Earth. The US has 5%of the population of the world but does 22% of the kidnapping.

The rise in kidnappings in the US has been dramatic and has becomeepidemic as can be seen here:

American ApartheidThe kidnappers target ethnic minorities by a wide margin. White maleshave been getting kidnapped at a rate of 736 per 100,000. Latinosat 1,862 per 100,000. And, black males at 4,789 per 100,000.

In South Africa under apartheid, in 1993, black males were kidnappedat a rate of 851 per 100,000. In the US, black males are kidnappedat a rate of 4,789 per 100,000. The US apartheid system has morethan a 500% higher kidnapping rate of blacks than the South Africanapartheid.

Ransoms RaisedThe kidnappers, hard up for money in these tough economic timeshave begun to raise their ransoms. Kidnappers in Arizona allow youto visit the person kidnapped but they demand a fee of $25 per visit.

And now one criminal cartel that controls the area called RiversideCounty in California has stated that they will be kidnappingpeople and demanding a ransom of $142.42 per day. Cartel boss, JeffStone, released this statement to the media about their increasein operations:

"I think we're blazing a new trail here. In these very challengingeconomic times, I believe this can be a source of revenue ... Ibelieve this can return 3 to 5 million (dollars) a year duringthese very challenging economic times."

Other cartels throughout the US are likely watching this withgreat interest.

Kidnapping Conditions In The Us

Often times those kidnapped in the US are placed in very overcrowdedconditions, brutally beaten and sodomized by other hostages. Oneparticularly brutal cartel boss who operates in the southern Arizonacorridor, with the nickname "Sheriff Joe", has been very activeabducting people from their cars after leaving bars and puttingthem in concentration camps in the Arizona desert at temperaturesoften above 110F and feeding them spoiled food and dressing themin pink jumpsuits - a strange fetish of the crime boss.

It has been hard to curtail these kidnappings because in many casesthese cartels are supported by the locals who see them as havingtheir best interests in mind.Sadly, in the US culture, those whoget kidnapped are often turned into an underclass and shunned aftertheir release. People who have been kidnapped are often not givenopportunities to work nor to travel after they have been sequestered.

Visitors To The Us Are Advised To Use Great Caution

Those looking to visit the US should look to other locations nearbylike Mexico where the rate of official kidnappings is more than90% lower at 64 per 100,000 people. Plus, the conditions for thosekidnapped in Mexico can be markedly better in some circumstances. Arecent search of a caged area where hostages are kept in Acapulcoturned up 19 prostitutes, two sacks of marijuana, numerous bottlesof alcohol, 100 fighting cocks and two peacocks.

Computer security engineers, including a member of the US ComputerEmergency Response Team, are complaining in a research paper thisweek that crooked bankers, terrorists and child abusers may begetting away with crimes because it is proving impossible fordigital investigators to unlock their encrypted hard drives. AsNew Scientist related in February, full-disc encryption is a majorconsumer security leap. It scrambles everything on a drive whenyou turn off your computer, time out or log out. But the flipside,of course, is consternation for some crime fighters.

The authors of the paper say they face four major problems. First,forensics don't always realise FDE is running on an evidence-carryingcomputer and turn it off - so all is lost. Second, when officerscopy a disc for analysis not realising it is FDE-encrypted, teamswaste hours of valuable crime lab time trying to make sense ofgobbledegook. Third, plugging in analysis hardware can trigger atrusted-hardware-only rule to encrypt everything. Fourth, someUS suspects plead the fifth amendment and refuse to give theirpassphrases, while others lie and give the wrong one, claiming theFDE had failed or that they must have forgotten the passphrase.

To cope with the FDE era, the US CERT-led team want improvedscene-of-crime routines and better preparation of searchwarrants. Their conclusion is somewhat hopeless however:

"Research is needed to develop new techniques and technology forbreaking or bypassing full disk encryption."

Which kind of goes against the whole point of encryption, we wouldsuggest.

Civil liberties group raises concerns over Met police purchase oftechnology to track public handsets over a targeted area - Guardian.co.uk

Britain's largest police force is operating covert surveillancetechnology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network,transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phonesremotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousandsof users in a targeted area.

The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitanpolice from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the USSecret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the MiddleEast among its customers. Strictly classified under governmentprotocol as "Listed X", it can emit a signal over an area of up toan estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minuteto release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can beused to track a person's movements in real time.

The disclosure has caused concern among lawyers and privacygroups that large numbers of innocent people could be unwittinglyimplicated in covert intelligence gathering. The Met has refusedto confirm whether the system is used in public order situations,such as during large protests or demonstrations.

Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaigngroup Big Brother Watch, warned the technology could give policethe ability to conduct "blanket and indiscriminate" monitoring:"It raises a number of serious civil liberties concerns andclarification is urgently needed on when and where this technologyhas been deployed, and what data has been gathered," he said. "Suchinvasive surveillance must be tightly regulated, authorised at thehighest level and only used in the most serious of investigations. Itshould be absolutely clear that only data directly relating totargets of investigations is monitored or stored," he said.

Datong's website says its products are designed to provide lawenforcement, military, security agencies and special forces withthe means to "gather early intelligence in order to identify andanticipate threat and illegal activity before it can be deployed".The company's systems, showcased at the DSEi arms fair in eastLondon last month, allow authorities to intercept SMS messagesand phone calls by secretly duping mobile phones within rangeinto operating on a false network, where they can be subjected to"intelligent denial of service". This function is designed to cutoff a phone used as a trigger for an explosive device.

A transceiver around the size of a suitcase can be placed ina vehicle or at another static location and operated remotelyby officers wirelessly. Datong also offers clandestine portabletransceivers with "covered antennae options available". Datong sellsits products to nearly 40 countries around the world, including inEastern Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. In2009 it was refused an export licence to ship technology worthGBP0.8m to an unnamed Asia Pacific country, after the Departmentfor Business, Innovation and Skills judged it could be used tocommit human rights abuses.

A document seen by the Guardian shows the Metropolitan policepaid GBP143,455 to Datong for "ICT hardware" in 2008/09. In 2010the 37-year-old company, which has been publicly listed sinceOctober 2005, reported its pro forma revenue in the UK was GBP3.9m,and noted that "a good position is being established with new lawenforcement customer groups". In February 2011 it was paid GBP8,373by Hertfordshire Constabulary according to a transaction reportreleased under freedom of information.

Between 2004 and 2009 Datong won over $1.6 (GBP1.03m) in contractswith US government agencies, including the Secret Service,Special Operations Command and the Bureau of Immigration andCustoms Enforcement. In February 2010 the company won a GBP750,000order to supply tracking and location technology to the US defencesector. Official records also show Datong entered into contractsworth more than GBP500,000 with the Ministry of Defence in 2009.

All covert surveillance is currently regulated under the Regulationof Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which states that to interceptcommunications a warrant must be personally authorised by the homesecretary and be both necessary and proportionate. The terms ofRipa allow phone calls and SMS messages to be intercepted in theinterests of national security, to prevent and detect serious crime,or to safeguard the UK's economic wellbeing.

Latest figures produced by the government-appointed interceptionof communications commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, show there were1,682 interception warrants approved by the home secretary in2010. Public authorities can request other communications data -such as the date, time and location a phone call was made - withoutthe authority of the home secretary. In 2010, 552,550 such requestswere made, averaging around 1,500 per day.

Barrister Jonathan Lennon, who specialises in cases involvingcovert intelligence and Ripa, said the Met's use of the Datongsurveillance system raised significant legislative questions aboutproportionality and intrusion into privacy.

"How can a device which invades any number of people's privacy beproportionate?" he said. "There needs to be clarification on whetherinterception of multiple people's communications - when you can'teven necessarily identify who the people are - is complaint with theact. It may be another case of the technology racing ahead of thelegislation. Because if this technology now allows multiple trackingand intercept to take place at the same time, I would have thoughtthat was not what parliament had in mind when it drafted Ripa."

Former detective superintendent Bob Helm, who had the authorityto sign off Ripa requests for covert surveillance during 31years of service with Lancashire Constabulary, said: "It's allvery well placed in terms of legislation when you can andcan't do it. It's got to be legal and obviously proportionate andjustified. If you can't do that, and the collateral implicationsfar outweigh the evidence you're going to get, well then you justdon't contemplate it."

In May the Guardian revealed the Met had purchased software used tomap suspects' digital movements using data gathered from socialnetworking sites, satnav equipment, mobile phones, financialtransactions and IP network logs. The force said the software wasbeing tested using "dummy data" to explore how it could be usedto examine "police vehicle movements, crime patterns and telephoneinvestigations."

The Met would not comment on its use of Datong technology or givedetails of where or when it had been used.

A spokesman said: "The MPS [Metropolitan police service] may employsurveillance technology as part of our continuing efforts to ensurethe safety of Londoners and detect criminality. It can be a vitaland highly effective investigative tool.

"Although we do not discuss specific technology or tactics, we canre-assure those who live and work in London that any activity weundertake is in compliance with legislation and codes of practice."

A spokesman for the Home Office said covert surveillance was keptunder "constant review" by the chief surveillance commissioner,Sir Christopher Rose, who monitors the conduct of authorities andensures they are complying with the appropriate legislation.He added: "Law enforcement agencies are required to act in accordancewith the law and with the appropriate levels of authorisation fortheir activity."

17 Quotes About The Coming Global Financial Collapse That Will MakeYour Hair Stand Up - The Economic Collapse

Is the world on the verge of another massive global financialcollapse? Yes. The western world is drowning in an ocean of debtunlike anything the world has ever seen before, and our financialmarkets are gigantic casinos that are dependent on huge mountains ofrisk and leverage remaining very stable. In the end, this house ofcards that has been built on a foundation of sand is going to comecrashing down in a horrifying manner. Usually in this column I goon and on about why things will soon get much worse. But today I amgoing to take a bit of a break. Today, I am going to let some of thetop financial professionals in the world tell you why things willsoon get much worse. Many of the quotes that you are about to readjust might make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Mostpeople out there have no idea what is about to happen. Most peopleout there are working hard and are busy preparing for the holidaysand they are hopeful that the economy will turn around soon. Butthat is not going to happen. We are heading for another major globalfinancial collapse, and when it happens the U.S. economy is goingto get even worse.

The epicenter for the coming global financial collapse is almostcertainly going to be in Europe. As you will see below, financialprofessionals all over the world are sounding the alarm aboutEurope. It is a disaster that everyone can see coming but thatnobody seems to be able to prevent.

Of course the failure of the "supercommittee" in the United Statescertainly is not helping matters. There is already talk that wemay soon see another downgrade for U.S. debt. It is hard to evendescribe how incompetent the U.S. Congress is.

There is a tremendous lack of leadership both in the United Statesand in Europe right now. The financial world is more interconnectedthan ever before, and when the financial dominoes start to fall itis going to take a miracle to keep a complete and total disasterfrom unfolding.

So when the time comes, who is going to step forward and providethat leadership?

That is a really, really good question.

Right now, panic and fear are spreading like wildfire in thefinancial world and nobody knows for sure what is going to happennext.

But one thing is for certain. Pessimism is growing stronger bythe day.

The following are 17 quotes about the coming global financialcollapse that will make your hair stand up....

#1 Credit Suisse's Fixed Income Research unit: "We seem tohave entered the last days of the euro as we currently knowit. That doesn't make a break-up very likely, but it does meansome extraordinary things will almost certainly need to happen -probably by mid-January - to prevent the progressive closure ofall the euro zone sovereign bond markets, potentially accompaniedby escalating runs on even the strongest banks."

#2 Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup: "Time is runningout fast. I think we have maybe a few months - it could be weeks, itcould be days - before there is a material risk of a fundamentallyunnecessary default by a country like Spain or Italy which wouldbe a financial catastrophe dragging the European banking systemand North America with it."

#3 Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank: "If you don't think Merkel's tonewill change then our investment advice is to dig a hole in theground and hide."

#4 David Rosenberg, a senior economist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto:"Lenders are finding it difficult to finance their day-to-dayoperations with short-term funding. This is a lot like 2008 butwith more twists."

#5 Christian Stracke, the head of credit research for Pimco: "Thisis just a repeat of what we saw in 2008, when everyone wanted tosee toxic assets off the banks' balance sheets"

#6 Paul Krugman of the New York Times: "At this point I'd guesssoaring rates on Italian debt leading to a gigantic bank run, bothbecause of solvency fears about Italian banks given a default andbecause of fear that Italy will end up leaving the euro. This thenleads to emergency bank closing, and once that happens, a decisionto drop the euro and install the new lira. Next stop, France."

#7 Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group: "More and more, we arehearing anecdotal comments from individual and professionals thatthis is the most difficult environment they have ever experiencedas the market is like a fish flopping around after being taken outof the water."

#8 Bob Janjuah of Nomura International: "Germany appears to beadamant that full political and fiscal integration over the nextdecade (nothing substantive will happen over the short term, inmy view) is the only option, and ECB monetisation is no longerpossible. I really think it is that clear and simple. And ifI am wrong, and the ECB does a U-turn and agrees to unlimitedmonetisation, I will simply wait for the inevitable knee-jerk rallyto fade before reloading my short risk positions. Even if Germanyand the ECB somehow agree to unlimited monetisation I believe itwill do nothing to fix the insolvency and lack of growth in theeurozone. It will just result in a major destruction of the ECB?sbalance sheet which will force an ECB recap. At that point, I thinkGermany and its northern partners would walk away. Markets alwayswant short, sharp, simple solutions."

#9 Dan Akerson, CEO of General Motors: "The '08 recession, whichwas a credit bubble that manifested itself through primarily thereal estate market, that was a serious stress....This is muchmore serious."

#11 Jim Rogers: "In 2002 it was bad, in 2008 it was worse and 2012or 2013 is going to be worse still - be careful"

#12 Dr. Pippa Malmgren, the President and founder of PrincipalisAsset Management who once worked in the White House as an adviserto President Bush: "Market forces are increasingly determining whatthe options are and foreclosing on options policymakers thought theyhad. One option which is now under discussion involves permittinga country to temporarily leave the Euro, return to its nativecurrency, devalue, commit to returning to the Euro at a betterdebt to GDP ratio, a better exchange rate and a better growthtrajectory and yet not sacrifice its EU membership. I would liketo say for the record that this is precisely the thought processthat I expected to evolve,but when I proposed this possibilityback in 2009, and again in September 2010, I had a 100% responsefrom clients and others that this was "impossible" and many feltit was "ridiculous".

They may be right but this is the currentstate of the discussion. The Handelsblatt in Germany has reportedthis conversation, but wrongly assumes that the country that willexit is Germany. I think that Germany will have to exit if theSouthern European states do not. Germany's preference is to stayin the Euro and have the others drop out. The problem has beenthe Germans could not convince the others to walk away. But, now,market pressures are forcing someone to leave. Germany is pushingfor that someone to be Italy. They hope that this would be a oneoff exception, not to be repeated by any other country. Obviously,though, if Italy leaves the Euro and reverts to Lira then themarkets will immediately and forcefully attack Spain, Portugaland even whatever is left of the already savaged Greeks.

These countries will not be able to compete against a devaluedGreece or Italy when it come to tourism or even infrastructure.

But, the principal target will be France. The three largest Frenchbanks have roughly 450 billion Euros of exposure to Italian debt.

So, further sovereign defaults are certainly inevitable, but that istrue under any scenario. Growth and austerity will not do the trick,as ZeroHedge rightly points out. Ultimately, I will not be at allsurprised to see Europe's banking system shut for days while thelosses and payments issues are worked out. People forget that theterm "bank holiday" was invented in the 1930's when the banks wereshut for exactly the same reason."

#13 Daniel Clifton, a policy strategist with Strategas ResearchPartners on the potential for more downgrades of U.S. debt: "Wewould expect further downgrades, a first downgrade from Moody'sand Fitch and possibly a second downgrade from S&P."

#14 Warren Buffett on the problems in the eurozone: "The system aspresently designed has revealed a major flaw. And that flaw won'tbe corrected just by words. Europe will either have to come closertogether or there will have to be some other rearrangement becausethis system is not working"

#15 David Kostin, equity strategist for Goldman Sachs: "The widerange of possible outcomes on both the super committee processand the unstable political economy in Europe drives our view thatinvestors should assume the worst while hoping for the best."

#16 Mark Mobius, the head of the emerging markets desk at TempletonAsset Management: "There is definitely going to be another financialcrisis around the corner"

When so many top financial professionals are freaking out like this,perhaps the rest of us should start paying attention.

They are telling us that "time is running out".

They are telling us that "there is definitely going to be anotherfinancial crisis".

They are telling us that this "is going to be worse" than 2008.

They are telling us that "the whole system is going down".

Yes, a devastating financial collapse really is coming. Just like in2008, it will seem like the "end of the world" while it is happening,but it won't be. It will severely damage our financial system andour economy, but it will not finish us off.

Think of it this way. When you build a sand castle at the beach,it doesn't get totally wiped out by the first wave or the secondwave that hits it. Each wave does significant damage, but thedestruction of your sand castle is a process.

It is the same thing with the U.S. economy. We once had the mostincredible economic machine that the world has ever seen. It isconstantly being guttedand the financial crisis of 2008 hit usreally hard, but we are still doing okay.

After this next financial crisis we will be in even worse shape. Butwe will still be breathing.

More "waves" will come after this next financial crisis. If wecontinue on the road that we are on, our economy will progressivelyget worse and worse.

Not everyone will agree with this analysis, and that is okay. Inthe end, time will reveal the truth to all of us.

*** Credit Suisse to Turn Over Data on Some U.S. Accounts - David Jolly

A branch of Credit Suisse in Basel, Switzerland. The I.R.S. askedfor help in locating information on American account holders.

Credit Suisse has been ordered by the Swiss government to turnover account data on some wealthy American clients as part of aU.S. effort to crack down on tax evasion, the bank said on Tuesday.

The bank, based in Zurich, wrote in an e-mailed statement that theU.S. Internal Revenue Service had recently asked the Swiss FederalTax Administration for help in locating information on Americanaccount holders under a 1996 American-Swiss tax treaty.

Credit Suisse said the Swiss tax administration had responded with"an order directing Credit Suisse A.G. to submit responsive accountinformation" to the Swiss authorities.

Alex Biscaro, a Credit Suisse spokesman in Zurich, said the bankhad begun to inform some U.S. clients by letter about the order,but he declined to comment further on the case. Beat Furrer, aspokesman for the Swiss tax administration, declined to detail thenature of the request. Dean Patterson, a spokesman in Washingtonfor the I.R.S., declined to comment.

The letters that Credit Suisse was sending to clients gave twooptions, according to Paul Behling, a partner at Withers Bergman,an international law firm: Either consent to the account databeing turned over to the I.R.S. or file an appeal with the Swissauthorities.

Mr. Behling said he would advise clients who believed they had abasis to appeal to do so, but that others should consider going tothe I.R.S. and trying to negotiate a lighter penalty. Under U.S. law,cheating the tax authorities can be punished with up to five yearsin prison and civil penalties.

Not all of the bank's U.S. clients are affected by the order. TheI.R.S. provided Swiss authorities with detailed information on theCredit Suisse clients in question, suggesting they had obtainedinformation about those individuals independently. The fact thatthe request was made under the existing treaty showed that therehas been no global deal on client data.

"U.S. officials are mining the data from the 30,000 people who haveparticipated in the voluntary disclosure programs," Mr. Behling said,referring to an I.R.S. initiative to encourage people with hiddenoffshore accounts to come clean. Those who entered the program didso were required to name names about the bankers and other adviserswho helped them to set up accounts and offshore corporations.

"The initial focus of the I.R.S. on Credit Suisse seems to be onU.S. persons holding offshore accounts through corporations ortrusts," he said. "This is not the end of it."

The United States and several European countries, notably Germany,Britain and France, have been seeking in recent years to ensurethat their citizens cannot take advantage of Swiss banking secrecyto hide assets. The Offshore Compliance Initiative, a U.S. JusticeDepartment effort to track down tax cheats, is conducting criminalinvestigations into at least eight banks.

The Justice Department told Credit Suisse in July that it was theobject of an investigation as part of "a broader industry inquiry"after four private bankers with links to Credit Suisse were indictedin February by the U.S. authorities on charges that they helpedAmericans to avoid taxes.

Credit Suisse said last week that it was setting aside 478 millionSwiss francs, or $535 million, for legal costs related to taxevasion charges in the United States and Germany. In September, itreached a deal with the German authorities to end an investigationover allegations that employees in DÃ¼sseldorf had helped Germanclients to hide income from tax collectors.

UBS, the biggest Swiss bank, paid $780 million in 2009 in the taxinvestigation and later agreed to hand over some client names toavoid prosecution.

Had a quick piece of news I wanted to call attention to, in lightof the recent developments at Zuccotti Park. For all of those whosay the protesters have it wrong, and don't really have a causeworth causing public unrest over, consider this story, sent to meby a friend on the Hill.

Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of twonamed Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying ona government application in order to obtain food stamps.

Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if youhave a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the optionof opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one ofthose states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past,she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about herpast in order to feed her two children.

The total "cost" of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the moneyback. But paying the money back was not enough for federal JudgeHenry Wingate.

Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federalguidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months toeight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate wasso outraged by McLemore's fraud that he decided to serve her upthe deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permittedhim to give her up to five years.

He ultimately gave her three years, saying, "The defendant's criminalrecord is simply abominable. She has been the beneficiary ofgovernment generosity in state court."

Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on WallStreet. Like McLemore, fraud defendants like Citigroup, GoldmanSachs, and Deutsche Bank have "been the beneficiary of governmentgenerosity." Goldman got $12.9 billion just through the AIGbailout. Citigroup got $45 billion, plus hundreds of billions ingovernment guarantees.

All of these companies have been repeatedly dragged into court forfraud, and not one individual defendant has ever been forced togive back anything like a significant portion of his ill-gottengains. The closest we've come is in a fraud case involving Citi,in which a pair of executives, Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley,were fined the token amounts of $100,000 and $80,000, respectively,for lying to shareholders about the extent of Citi's debt.

Neither man was forced to admit to intentional fraud. Both got tokeep their jobs.

Anita McLemore, meanwhile, lied to feed her children, gave backevery penny of her "fraud" when she got caught, and is now goingto do three years in prison. Explain that, Eric Holder!

Here's another thing that boggles my mind: You get busted for drugsin this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligibleto receive food stamps.

But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, whichhas repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses andhas repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud,and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion inbailouts and other forms of federal assistance.

This is the reason why all of these settlements allowing banksto walk away without "admissions of wrongdoing" are particularlyinsidious. A normal person, once he gets a felony conviction,immediately begins to lose his rights as a citizen.

But white-collar criminals of the type we've seen in recent yearson Wall Street - both the individuals and the corporate "citizens"- do not suffer these ramifications. They commit crimes without realconsequence, allowing them to retain access to the full smorgasbordof subsidies and financial welfare programs that, let's face it,are the source of most of their profits.

Why, I wonder, does a bank that has committed fraud multiple timesget to retain access to the Federal Reserve discount window? Whyshould Citigroup and Goldman Sachs get to keep their status asPrimary Dealers of U.S. government debt? Are there not enough bankswithout extensive histories of fraud and malfeasance that can beawarded these de facto subsidies?

Is the US Getting Domestic Indefinite Military Detention for Thanksgiving? - Adam Serwer

A bipartisan group of senators is poised to force through dramaticchanges to how the US government handles suspected terrorists-overthe objections of the White House and Senate Democratic leadership.

Legislative language that emerged from the Senate Armed ServicesCommittee on Tuesday afternoon would mandate the automatic,indefinite military detention of noncitizens apprehended in theUnited States who are suspected members of Al Qaeda or associatedgroups. The wording, which is part of a must-pass bill to fund themilitary, also appears to allow the indefinite military detentionof citizens and legal permanent residents. The bill would alsoextend restrictions on transfers of detainees from Guantanamo Bay,though only for one year.

Obama administration officials fear that the mandatory detentionprovisions could force the FBI to interrupt ongoing investigationsin order to hand suspected terrorists over to the military. Theyalso worry that the new rules could interfere with the prosecutionof suspected terrorists in federal courts. At a homeland securityand counterterrorism conference in September, White Housecounterterrorism adviser John Brennan warned that "this approachwould impose unprecedented restrictions on the ability of experiencedprofessionals to combat terrorism." Senate Majority Leader HarryReid (D-Nev.) held up the defense funding bill in mid-October onthe basis of the those objections. The latest changes to the billappear to address some of the administration's concerns by claimingthat designating an individual a terrorist "does not require theinterruption of ongoing surveillance or intelligence gatheringactivities." But civil liberties advocates are disappointed.

"The problems with these provisions have not been fixed-they'vebeen made worse," says Chris Anders, legislative counsel with theAmerican Civil Liberties Union. "There is absolutely no reasonfor Congress to now pass legislation that would put in indefinitemilitary detention American citizens and other suspects apprehendedfar from any battlefield, even within the United States itself. "

Anders also points out that it's entirely possible that thedetention provisions could become more restrictive once otherSenate Republicans start demanding changes to them. Reid, however,doesn't sound like he's willing to hold the bill up any further. "Ithasn't been worked out to the satisfaction of everyone," Reid saidof the defense bill, "but there comes a time when we have to stopnegotiating and move to the legislation."

A Senate Democratic aide said that Reid was hoping to move the billto the floor as early as next week.

An order from the U.S. District Court for the Central District ofCalifornia has revealed the FBI lied to the court about the existenceof records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),taking the position that FOIA allows it to withhold information fromthe court whenever it thinks this is in the interest of nationalsecurity. Using the strongest possible language, the court disagreed:"The Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively misleadthe Court." Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal. v. FBI("Shura CouncilI"), No. 07-1088, 3 (C.D. Cal. April 27, 2011) (emphasis added).

This case may prove relevant in EFF's ongoing FOIA litigationagainst the FBI. As discussed further below, one of the issues inShura Council was the FBI's extensive and improper use of "outsidethe scope" redactions. The agency has also used these heavily inat least one of our current cases - in areas where it is highlyunlikely the material blocked out is actually outside the scope ofour FOIA request. (see example to the left from our case seekingrecords on the government's push to expand federal surveillancelaws). We'll be writing more about that case in the coming weeksand posting the documents we received on this site soon.

Shura Council started five years ago in May 2006, after widespreadreporting on the FBI's programs targeting Muslims after September11, 2001. At that time, several Muslim citizens and organizations inSouthern California, including the Islamic Shura Council of SouthernCalifornia and theCouncil on American Islamic Relations(CAIR),submitted a broad joint FOIA request to the FBI seeking"[a]ny records relating or referring" to themselves, "including. . . records that document any collection of information aboutmonitoring, surveillance, observation, questioning, interrogation,investigation and/or infiltration[.]" Shura Council I at 4.

In 2008, after the FBI produced only minimal records, the requestersfiled a federal lawsuit. The FBI then searched for and locatedadditional records for nine of the plaintiffs, but these recordswere heavily redacted, with much of the information withheld as"outside the scope" of the plaintiffs' FOIA request. The FBIattested, in documents and declarations it submitted under oath tothe court, that these were all the records that existed about theplaintiffs and that the materials labeled "outside the scope" were"not responsive" to the plaintiffs' FOIA request.

After court ordered the FBI to submit full versions of the recordsin camera, along with a new declaration about the agency's search,the FBI revealed for the first time that it had materially andfundamentally mislead the court in its earlier filings. The unalteredversions of the documents showed that the information the agencyhad withheld as "outside the scope" was actually well within thescope of the plaintiffs' FOIA request. The government also admittedit had a large number of additional responsive documents that ithadn't told the plaintiffs or the court about. Id. at 7-8.

If these revelations weren't bad enough, the FBI also arguedFOIA allows it to mislead the court where it believes revealinginformation would "compromise national security." Id. at 9. TheFBI also argued, that "its initial representations to the Courtwere not technically false" because although the information mighthave been "factually" responsive to the plaintiffs' FOIA request,it was "legally nonresponsive." Id. at 9, n. 4 (emphasis added).

The court noted, this "argument is indefensible," id. at 9-10, andheld, "the FOIA does not permit the government to withhold responsiveinformation from the court." (Id.)(upheld on appeal in Islamic ShuraCouncil of S. Cal. v. FBI, __ F.3d __, No. 09-56035, at 4280-81(9th Cir. Mar. 30, 2011) ("Shura Council II").1 The court stated:

The Government argues that there are times when the interests ofnational security require the Government to mislead the Court. TheCourt strongly disagrees. The Government's duty of honesty to theCourt can never be excused, no matter what the circumstance. TheCourt is charged with the humbling task of defending the Constitutionand ensuring that the Government does not falsely accuse people,needlessly invade their privacy or wrongfully deprive them of theirliberty. The Court simply cannot perform this important task ifthe Government lies to it. Deception perverts justice. Truth alwayspromotes it.

(Shura Council I at 17) (emphasis added). This is an importantopinion for FOIA requesters because sometimes the only protectiona FOIA requester has from the government's potentially arbitrarywithholding of information is a court's in camera review of the fullversions of documents. If the government were allowed to withholdinformation from the court, this protection would be meaningless andthe role of judicial oversight in FOIA cases would be compromised.

Unfortunately for the plaintiffs in Shura Council, this seems tobe a hollow victory. Although the court did not restrain itselffrom using the strongest possible language to criticize thegovernment's actions (calling the FBI's arguments "untenable,"id. at 3, "indefensible," id. at 10, and "not credible" id. at 17)it also held that "disclosing the number and nature of the documentsthe Government possesses could reasonably be expected to compromisenational security." Id. 18. Therefore it did not order the governmentto release the records to the plaintiffs or even to reveal howmany records turned up in the second search. And on appeal, theNinth Circuit held that neither the plaintiffs nor their attorneyshad the right to see the original version of the district court'sorder (filed under seal) because it contained information the FBIconsidered to be "national security and sensitive law enforcementinformation." (Shura Council II at 4286).

It seems unlikely that, five years after the plaintiffs filed theirFOIA request, the release of the information the FBI has on theseindividuals and organizations would truly threaten national securityor an ongoing criminal investigation. None of the plaintiffs appearsto have been arrested or retained in conjunction with a crime orforeign terrorist plot, so it seems more likely that this is yetanother example of the government valuing secrecy over transparency.

The district court's April 27, 2011 order after remand is here,and the Ninth Circuit opinion remanding the case is here.

UPDATE (November 21, 2011): In a later opinion, the districtcourt sanctioned the government for lying. In issuing monetarysanctions against the DOJ, the court held, "the Government'sdeception of the Court was without any factual or legal basisand simply wrong." (p. 19). The court noted issuing sanctionswas necessary to "deter the Government from deceiving the Courtagain." (p. 2). Unfortunately, it's not clear this practice willend any time soon. The DOJ has been attempting to change its FOIAregulations to codify the procedures it used in this case. As thecourt noted, even though the proposed changes were withdrawn,"the deceptive policy and practice of the DOJ with respect toasserting and applying exclusions under FOIA apparently remainsintact." (p. 19).

Immersive Labs in Manhattan has developed software for digitalbillboards that gauges the characteristics of passers-by in orderto display ads likely to attract them. - Natasha Singer

Immersive Labs

Smart signs using facial recognition software are scheduled forintroduction in three cities this month.

But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facialdetection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specificbar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowdand the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where togo. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.

As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, whichperceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals,and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, arepoised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing andsmart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailorservices to customers, and not so great news for people who cherishtheir privacy. The spread of such technology - essentially, thedemocratization of surveillance - may herald the end of anonymity.

And this technology is spreading. Immersive Labs, a company inManhattan, has developed software for digital billboards usingcameras to gauge the age range, sex and attention level of apasser-by. The smart signs, scheduled to roll out this month in LosAngeles, San Francisco and New York, deliver ads based on consumers'demographics. In other words, the system is smart enough to display,say, a Gillette ad to a male passer-by rather than an ad for Tampax.

Those endeavors pale next to the photo-tagging suggestion toolintroduced by Facebook this year. When a person uploads photos tothe site, the "Tag Suggestions" feature uses facial recognitionto identify that user's friends in those photos and automaticallysuggests name tags for them. It's a neat trick that frees peoplefrom the cumbersome task of repeatedly typing the same friends'names into their photo albums.

"Millions of people are using it to add hundreds of millions oftags," says Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman. Other well-knownprograms like Picasa, the photo editing software from Google,and third-party apps like PhotoTagger, from face.com, work similarly.

But facial recognition is proliferating so quickly that some regulatorsin the United States and Europe are playing catch-up. On the onehand, they say, the technology has great business potential.

On the other, because facial recognition works by analyzing andstoring people's unique facial measurements, it also entails seriousprivacy risks.

Using off-the-shelf facial recognition software, researchers atCarnegie Mellon University were recently able to identify about athird of college students who had volunteered to be photographedfor a study - just by comparing photos of those anonymous studentsto images publicly available on Facebook. By using other publicinformation, the researchers also identified the interests andpredicted partial Social Security numbers of some students.

"It's a future where anonymity can no longer be taken for granted -even when we are in a public space surrounded by strangers," saysAlessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technologyand public policy at Carnegie Mellon who directed the studies.

If his team could so easily "infer sensitive personal information,"he says, marketers could someday use more invasive techniquesto identify random people on the street along with, say, theircredit scores.

Some video chat sites are using software from face.com, an Israelicompany, to make sure that participants are displaying their faces,not other body parts, says Gil Hirsch, the chief executive offace.com. The software also has retail uses, like virtually tryingout eyeglasses at eyebuydirect.com, and entertainment applications,like moustachify.me, a site that adds a handle bar mustache to aface in a photo.

But privacy advocates worry about more intrusive situations.

Now, for example, advertising billboards that use facial detectionmight detect a young adult male and show him an ad for, say, Axedeodorant. Companies that make such software, like Immersive Labs,say their systems store no images or data about passers-by nor dothey analyze their emotions.

But what if the next generation of mall billboards could analyzeskin quality and then publicly display an ad for acne cream, ordetect sadness and serve up an ad for antidepressants?

"You might think it's cool, or you might think it's creepy, dependingon the context," says Maneesha Mithal, the associate director ofthe division of privacy and identity protection for the Bureauof Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. Whateverconsumers think, she says, they should be able to choose whetherto be subject to such marketing practices. (The F.T.C. is planninga workshop next month on facial recognition.)

ON Facebook, people who find the photo-tagging suggestion programcreepy may turn off the system that proposes their names to friendswho are uploading photos. If people opt out, Facebook deletestheir facial comparison data, according to the site. Users may alsopreapprove or reject being listed by name in a friend's photo beforeit is posted on their profiles.

Those options may suffice for many.

But in Germany, where German and European privacy regulationsrequire private companies to obtain explicit permission from aperson before they store information about that individual, merelybeing able to opt out does not go far enough, says Johannes Caspar,the commissioner of the Hamburg Data Protection Authority. (Althoughthe United States has federal data protection laws pertaining tospecific industries like credit and video rental, no general lawrequires that all companies obtain explicit consent before storingpersonal data about an individual.)

Mr. Caspar says many users do not understand that Facebook's tagsuggestion feature involves storing people's biometric data tore-identify them in later photos. Last summer, he asked Facebook togive current users in Germany the power to delete their biometricdata and to give new users in Germany the power to refuse to havetheir biometric data collected in the first place. In the long term,he says, such popular uses of facial recognition could moot people'sright to remain anonymous.

Mr. Caspar said last week that he was disappointed with thenegotiations with Facebook and that his office was now preparingto take legal action over the company's biometric database.

Facebook told a German broadcaster that its tag suggestion featurecomplied with European data protection laws.

Washington DC - At one Department of Motor Vehicles' office inthe nation's capital, motorists can get a driver's license, temporarytags and something wholly unrelated to the road: a free HIV test.

In a city with one of the highest percentages of residents livingwith HIV or AIDS, health officials have spent the last yeartest-driving the HIV screening program. Since the program beganlast October, more than 5,000 people have been tested at the DMVsite and gotten results while they waited.

Now, officials are expanding the program, offering testing for thefirst time at an office where Washington residents register forfood stamps, Medicaid and other government assistance. On Monday,the first day of the program, 60 people got tested, officialssaid. As an incentive, they're being offered a $5 gift card to alocal grocery store.

"You have to meet people where they are," explained SheilaBrockington, who oversees HIV testing at the DMV office in southeastWashington, the only one of the city's three DMV service centerswhere it is offered. "You're waiting anyway. You might as well."

The testing project isn't run by the DMV but by a nonprofit group,Family and Medical Counseling Service Inc., which uses an officeinside the site. To ensure confidentiality, residents get testedand receive results in the private office, out of earshot ofthose going about their usual DMV business. The nonprofit got a$250,000 grant to do the testing and secured the support of thecity's Health Department and the DMV. Now a second, similar grantis funding expansion.

Government statistics released in June show about 1.1 millionAmericans were living with the AIDS virus in 2008, and other studiesshow that about 10 percent to 20 percent of U.S. adults are testedannually. But those involved in HIV/AIDS work recognize that moreneeds to be done to identify people living with HIV, said ChrisCollins, the vice president and director of public policy for amfAR,the Foundation for AIDS Research.

"We need to be looking for creative ways to reach people who haven'ttested in the past," said Collins, who hasn't studied Washington'sprogram but said innovation and creativity by cities is important.

In Washington, not everyone was sold on the idea when it wasproposed by the head of the Family and Medical Counseling Service,Angela Wood. She came up with the idea after sitting at a DMVoffice herself. Initially, some officials doubted many people wouldtest. Now, however, between 25 and 35 people get tested every day atthe DMV location. Anyone who agrees gets $7 off their DMV services.

For those who test positive, the nonprofit offers a free ride to itsnearby office where they can arrange counseling and an appointmentwith a doctor. So far, less than 1 percent of those screened havetested positive, though some already knew their status. That'sbelow the city's infection rate of 3 percent.

By now, the four people who run the program at the DMV office havetheir pitch for testing down. When people are on line, one of thetesters approaches with the offer: free tests, money off your bill,and the promise that it won't hurt.

"We don't do blood. We do swabs," tester Karen Johnson tells patrons,explaining that the test of their saliva takes 20 minutes and thatparticipants will not lose their place in the DMV line.

For patrons, the offer is generally a surprise, but not an unwelcomeone.

Bus driver Nat Jordan, 35, was at the DMV office one day to get hiscar registered. He said he accepted because he gets tested once ayear anyway. Colleen Russell, 28, a newly married nurse who was atthe DMV to change her name on her driver's license, said she knewshe was negative. But she said she got tested because she comes incontact with patients every day who could be infected.

Not all residents are sure of their status, though. One man who gottested and spoke on the condition that his name not be used said hiswife is HIV positive. Though he had had a negative HIV test before,it reassured him to have a second one at the DMV.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindednessand many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad,wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquiredby vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." - Mark Twain

It is often reported that around 80% of American citizens do nothave a passport. Therefore, the great majority of Americans havenever traveled outside of the country. Consequently, these citizenshave a limited scope of understanding when it comes to life outsideof and, perhaps even, inside America.

Many Americans believe the United States to be the greatest countryon earth, the center of the Universe. A place that all other nationsseek to emulate. Indeed, it is the only global super power withmany endearing qualities. However, as one travels to other nationsand experiences foreign cultures, many preconceived notions aboutAmerica seem to dissipate, while others may be enhanced.

Before we get into the things you may notice about America whentravelling extensively abroad, it's important to point out thateveryone's perception may vary. People view their world withdifferent political or religious lenses, and different levels ofpatriotism. But being as objective as possible, you may be surprisedhow many preconceived notions of America are shattered when you'reexposed to different perspectives.

Here are 10 things you may realize about America and the world whentravelling abroad:

1. Only Americans live to work: Although many cultures possess astrong work ethic, America seems to be the only place where theoverwhelming majority of the population "live to work" and notsimply "work to live." In many developing countries, for example,you'll notice that the average person seems to have far more freetime than the average American. Or, perhaps, they simply enjoytheir free time more than Americans caught in the rat race.2. Remarkably few countries are engaged in foreign wars: Americais widely considered a military aggressor by most countries. Mostnations appear content to optimize life and commerce within theconfines of their borders and see no benefit to meddling in othernation's affairs. Even the nations that respect America's role asa human rights watchdog, view their militarism as a bigger threatthan a force for good.3. Emphasis on family and neighbors: Americans have becomesomewhat detached from their neighbors and, in some cases, fromtheir own families. Again, most noticeably in developing countries,it is not uncommon to see middle-class families with threegenerations living under the same roof. Love and respect for theelderly and children seems far greater in foreign lands than inAmerica.4. Commerce is much more localized: Even though you can find aMcDonald's in nearly any major city around the world, day-to-daycommerce is clearly more localized in most nations. Yes, large storesand malls can also be found everywhere, but there's a noticeableplethora of small shops, food stands, independent taxis and othermicro-vendors in nearly every country except the United States.5. English is the universal tourism language: Americans have agreat advantage when travelling the world: English is the universaltourism language. From Latin America to Asia, English is spoken atnearly all hotels or any attraction or service needed for you tofunction. You'll find that Europeans, Russians, and even Chinesetourists will speak at least some English to function abroad.6. America does not have exclusivity on freedom: Americans are taughtthat they live in the land of the free, yet most populations enjoyeven greater freedom in their day-to-day lives. You will not seeoppressive security at airports or train stations in the majorityof the world. You will not see tax collectors or health departmentofficials cracking down on small food stands as they do in theU.S. Most lemonade stands don't risk being raided anywhere butin America.7. America is unreasonably expensive: Although most Americansnotice the rising costs of everything from housing, to food andhealth care, they may assume that they still possess the higheststandard of living in the world. In general, Americans do enjoy ahigh level of comfort compared to the global population. However,even lower-income Americans will experience a significantly higherstandard of living in almost any other nation in the world.8. Service with a smile: The American dollar is still respectedand desired by tourist destinations which typically results ingrateful service providers. But when you spend an extended periodof time abroad, you begin to realize that foreigners take greatpride in providing service with a smile, something that seems tobe in decline in America. Americans generally seem more disgruntledwith their jobs than foreign counterparts. However, notably, thereseems to be more immediate recourse if things go wrong with yourservice in the United States.9. Public transportation inferiority: One of the main thingsyou'll realize about America when travelling abroad is their woefulinferior public transportation. Granted, Americans love their carsand the freedom that they bring, along with comparably excellentroad system. However, since other nations were slower to acquire theindividual wealth for private vehicles, they were forced to developan excellent variety of public transportation including trains,buses, taxis, rickshaws etc... Now, most of these countries havealso developed excellent road systems in addition to world classairports and train stations. America has a long way to go.10. Everyone wants the same thing as you: No matter what Americansmay think about people in other cultures, they all seem tooverwhelmingly want the same thing; a peaceful, more fruitful,and better future to raise their children in. Additionally, theyall require and demand the basic freedom to live in basic privacyand security.= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Paris - The highest court in the European Union said on Thursdaythat Internet service providers could not be required to monitortheir customers' online activity to filter out the illegal sharingof music and other copyrighted material.

The ruling, by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, is asetback for a Belgian group representing music copyright owners,which had sought tougher measures to crack down on online filesharing. The organization, Sabam, had sued a Belgian Internetprovider, Scarlet Extended, saying its customers were illegallysharing music files.

Sabam had won a ruling in a Belgian court, which said Scarletshould have to install a system to filter out any unauthorizedexchanges of songs on its own, not just in response to complaintsfrom copyright holders.

The high court in Luxembourg said such a requirement would bedisproportionate, adding that it would violate "the freedom toconduct business, the right to protection of personal data and thefreedom to receive or impart information."

"E.U. law precludes an injunction made against an Internet serviceprovider requiring it to install a system for filtering allelectronic communications passing via its services, which appliesindiscriminately to all its customers, as a preventive measure,exclusively at its expense, and for an unlimited period," thecourt wrote.

Lobbying groups for Internet service providers and for consumershailed the decision.

"This judgment sends a crystal-clear signal," said Monique Goyens,director general of B.E.U.C., a Brussels group that lobbies forconsumer rights. "Internet providers cannot be asked to policeconsumers' use of the Web."

Malcolm Hutty, president of EuroISPA, a service providers' lobbyinggroup, added, "This ruling is of fundamental importance for thefuture of the Internet and the development of a strong digitalsingle market."

The music industry shrugged off the implications of thedecision. Other measures to curb illegal file sharing, includingthe blocking of Web sites that enable piracy and the cutoff ofpersistent file-sharers' Internet connections, will not be affected,the industry's international lobbying group said.

"In this particular case, the court rejected the content-filteringmeasure presented by the Belgian court as too broad," Frances Moore,chief executive of the International Federation of the PhonographicIndustry, said in a statement.

"However, this does not affect the forms of I.S.P. cooperationthat I.F.P.I. advocates."

Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties onhis hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatricevaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. Thatstudent was 5 years old.

Michael Davis is diagnosed with Attention Deficit HyperactivityDisorder or ADHD. His mother says it has led to fights atschool. But when the school district said it had a plan to changeMichael's behavior, his mother says things went wrong.

"Michael is energetic," Thelma Gray said. "He is one big ball of energy."

Gray calls Michael a comedian. She says his biggest problem is hisADHD stops him from thinking before he acts or speaks.

"He's very loving," Gray said. "He's a good kid and he's not thediscipline problem that he was made out to be."

Those discipline problems include fights with other students,even throwing a chair.

Gray says the school, Rio Calaveras Elementary of Stockton, wantedto change that behavior by having Michael meet with a schoolpolice officer.

"He could come out and talk to Michael and the kids are normallyscared straight," said Gray, describing how she says the schooldistrict proposed the meeting.

But the meeting didn't go as planned.

Gray says Michael was agitated when the officer entered the room,and the whole meeting ended with Michael arrested and cuffed,with zip ties on his hands and his feet.

"I was led to believe that Michael saw a police officer and attackeda police officer on sight," said Gray, adding that that's notwhat happened.

She knows because she ultimately obtained a copy of the policereport.

In it, the officer, Lt. Frank Gordo, says he placed his hand onMichael's and, "the boy pushed my hand away in a batting motion,pushed papers off the table, and kicked me in the right knee."

When Michael wouldn't calm down, Gordo cuffed Michael's handsand feet with zip ties and took the boy to the Stockton KaiserPsychiatric Hospital in the back of a squad car.

He had not called Michael's mother or father at that point.Michael was cited for battery on a police officer.

"I didn't know until two or three weeks later that my son was ziptied," Gray said.

Her ex-husband had picked Michael up from the hospital. When hearrived, Michael's wrists were still zip tied behind his back.

KCRA 3 asked Rio Calaveras Elementary, the Stockton Unified SchoolDistrict and the Stockton Unified School District

Police on multiple occasions to comment on what happened duringMichael's meeting with the officer.

Both the police chief and the school district said they couldnot comment.

The district said it could not comment because of privacy lawsregarding students and because the San Joaquin County Grand Juryand the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rightswere investigating.

"I have been around young children that when they can't expressthemselves and don't feel they're being heard. They really need tomake a loud statement in some way and it's often a very physicalstatement."- UC Davis Professor of Education Shannon Cannon

Also, neither the district nor the Stockton School Police wouldcomment on what procedures were in place to handle children withbehavioral problems.

"Some of that's really abstract," said UC Davis Professor ofEducation Shannon Cannon, speaking on how young children react. "Weneed to try to make it a little bit more concrete," she said,adding that young children are often more physical than vocal.

When KCRA 3 interviewed Cannon, her students were learning aboutdealing with problem behavior in the classroom. Cannon says she hasseen children as young as 7 years old act out physically and theycan get violent, even dangerous to others around them -- but addsthat it is important to have a behavioral plan in place as soon asthe child is diagnosed.

She says children as young as 5 years old may not be able to tellan adult what is bothering them.

"I have been around young children that, when they can't expressthemselves, and don't feel they're being heard," says Cannon,adding that "they really need to make a loud statement in some wayand it's often a very physical statement."

KCRA 3 obtained a copy of the U.S. Department of Education's reporton Michael's arrest.

The report states that the Stockton Unified School District "delayedan evaluation of the student {Michael} which denied the student afair and public education."

They added that the school didn't offer behavioral services toMichael or his mother, because "it would cost the district money."

The report goes on to say that, whether or not funds are availablethrough state or federal grants, the school district had anobligation to have Michael evaluated, which it failed to do.

As for Michael's mother, Gray said she doesn't want an apology fromthe district, she simply wants the school district to help her getMichael the education he's entitled.

"I've been asking," Gray said. "I've been begging for any assistancefor Michael to get placed appropriately and this is what they choseto do."

A juvenile court judge eventually dismissed the battery chargesagainst Michael.

Criminals who commit offences online and cyber bullies will bebanned from the internet as part of the Government's new cybersecurity strategy, announced today.

It calls for police and courts to make more use of existing"cyber sanctions" to restrict access to the social networks andinstant messaging services in cases of hacking, fraud and onlinebullying. Sex offenders and those convicted of harrassment oranti-social behaviour also face more internet restrictions underthe new strategy.

Similar orders have been imposed on those charged with involvementin a series of cyber attacks by the Anonymous and LulzSec groupsearlier this year, while they await trial.

Cyber sanctions were also used following the riots this summer. Twoteenagers in Dundee were banned from the web for inciting riotsvia Facebook.

Officials are now looking into whether "cyber tag" technology couldbe used to monitor offenders and report to authorities if breaktheir bail or sentence conditions by using the internet.

"The Ministry of Justice and the Home Office will consider andscope the development of a new way of enforcing these orders,using 'cyber-tags' which are triggered by the offender breachingthe conditions that have been put on their internet use, and whichwill automatically inform the police or probation service," cybersecurity strategy said.

It added that if the regime is a success restrictions on internetuse could be imposed on "a wider group of offenders".

Police forces across the country will also follow the exampleof the Met's Police Central e-Crime Unit by recruiting "cyberspecials"; internet experts will be encouraged to volunteer asspecial constables to help investigate online crime.

The four-year strategy is also designed to address cyber espionageand attacks from states such as China and Russia and "patriotic"hackers.

GCHQ, Britain's eavesdropping agency, is to receive around Â£385mof the total Â£650m budget to develop its ability to detect,defend and fight back online. The problem of discovering thetrue source of a cyber attack will be among the top prioritiesfor the Cheltenham-based agency's experts, as well as developing"tactics and techniques" for online conflict in collaboration withthe Ministry of Defence's new cyber unit.

GCHQ will also declassify and commercialise some of its cybertechnology to help the private sector improve its security online,as part of a broader effort to increase cooperation betweengovernment and industry. Other measures with include a new "hub"for information sharing to allow the security services to shareinformation on cyber threats with major infrastructure firms suchas BT, Barclays and utilities companies.

"This strategy not only deals with the threat from terrorists toour national security, but also with the criminals who threatenour prosperity as well as blight the lives of many ordinary peoplethrough cyber crime," said David Cameron.

*** Treasury Developing Global Tracking System for All Financial Transactions

Legal Entity Identification for Financial Contracts, a universalstandard for identifying all parties to financial contracts is anew standard that is being developed by the U.S. Treasury - Officeof Financial Research.

At a speech today at the "The Macroprudential Toolkit: Measurementand Analysis" Conference held in Washington D.C., and hosted bythe OFR and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, TreasurySecretary Geithner hinted at the global reach LEI will have:The OFR will collect and make available, to regulators and to thepublic, more and better financial data.

It will seek to better measure and analyze factors affectingfinancial stability.

It will report to Congress and to the public on its analyses ofsignificant market developments, potential threats to financialstability, and appropriate policy responses.

And it will collaborate with regulators, industry, the academiccommunity, and foreign policymakers and institutions to establishglobal standards for financial data. The Legal Entity Identifierproject, which precisely identifies the parties to financialtransactions, will help regulators, risk managers, and marketparticipants all better understand risks and exposures across thefinancial system. We are pleased that U.S. leadership has helpedgive a strong start to the LEI project, whose framework was recentlyendorsed by the G-20.

Your goal today is to help set the agenda for the Office ofFinancial Research, help us to identify areas where better dataand more research offers the best return.

As the architects of both the Council and the OFR have recognized: weneed to rely extensively on collaboration-among regulators, betweenthe public and private sectors, internationally, and otherwise..Although Geithner couched the LEI as collecting data that isnecessary to track global financial stability, make no mistake, LEIis a monster global financial tracking system that has a mandatesufficiently broad in scope that it may result in the tracking ofthe mom and pop coffee shop, if some technocrat deems the mortgageon the coffee shop a trigger "financial contract" that requiresan LEI. It, for sure, will cover gold dealers and perhaps anytransactions with corporations and businesses. Down the road, itis not difficult to imagine the interpretation of the regulationswill be stretched to include individuals, as "financial parties",when gold coins are purchased.

As stated in the development notice published in the FederalRegister:

The scope of the reference data provided for each LEI issued shouldbe sufficient to verify that users have correctly identified anentity and should include at a minimum the following informationfor each Identifier:

A joint U.S./UK research team has found that common encryptiontechniques are so good that law enforcement, from local to highlyresourceful federal agencies, are unable to get at data on a computerhard disk that could be used to prove the guilt of people using thecomputer to perpetuate crimes. In looking at the current technology,the team, as they describe in their paper published in DigitalInvestigation, find that if criminals use commonly available harddrive encryption software, law enforcement very often is unablefind anything that can be used against them.

Contrary to what we all see in the movies and on television,cracking an encrypted drive is not a simple thing; in fact, it'sso difficult that if someone has encrypted their hard drive, thereis apparently little law enforcement (or anyone else) can do readthe data on the drive. Adding to the frustration, at least on thepart of law enforcement, is the fact that they can't force peopleto give up their passwords.

The authors of the report suggest there are some things lawenforcement can do, but they all must happen prior to a drivebeing buttoned up by encryption. Specifically, they say thatlaw enforcement should stop turning computers off to bring themto another location for study, doing so only causes the needfor a password to be entered to read the encrypted data. Also,in some cases, doing so causes the data to be automaticallydestroyed. Fortunately, there are some tools forensics experts canuse to gather data if it sits untouched, such as copying everythingin memory to a separate disk. The team also suggests that lawenforcement look first to see if the drive has been encrypted beforescanning it with their own software, as doing so will likely resultin a lot of wasted time.

The unfortunate bottom line though, is that the authors openly admitthat once the drive is encrypted, there is little to nothing to bedone, which a lot of criminals are surely going to be really pleasedto hear. The team suggests that the government embark on a researchmission of its own to figure out a way to subvert encrypted drivesor it will find itself with little reason to bother confiscatingcomputers used by criminals to commit crimes in the future.

Abstract The increasing use of full disk encryption (FDE) cansignificantly hamper digital investigations, potentially preventingaccess to all digital evidence in a case. The practice of shuttingdown an evidential computer is not an acceptable technique whendealing with FDE or even volume encryption because it may resultin all data on the device being rendered inaccessible for forensicexamination. To address this challenge, there is a pressing needfor more effective on-scene capabilities to detect and preserveencryption prior to pulling the plug. In addition, to give digitalinvestigators the best chance of obtaining decrypted data in thefield, prosecutors need to prepare search warrants with FDE inmind. This paper describes how FDE has hampered past investigations,and how circumventing FDE has benefited certain cases. This papergoes on to provide guidance for gathering items at the crime scenethat may be useful for accessing encrypted data, and for performingon-scene forensic acquisitions of live computer systems. Thesemeasures increase the chances of acquiring digital evidence in anunencrypted state or capturing an encryption key or passphrase. Someimplications for drafting and executing search warrants to dealingwith FDE are discussed.= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

More Bugs

Cyborg search-and-rescue insects' power source unveiled

Efforts to create an army of cyborg insects are being pursued bya team of US-based engineers.

The group is investigating ways to harvest energy from the creaturesto power sensors and other equipment fastened to their bodies.

The team has created an energy scavenging device that is attachedclose to the insects' wings.

It suggested the creatures might one day be used to aidsearch-and-rescue operations and surveillance.

The University of Michigan team of engineers published their studyin the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Power source The report noted that, despite major advances inmicro-air-vehicle technology, no-one had been able to match theaerodynamic performance and manoeuvring capability of insects.

However, it said that if insects were to be equipped with controlmechanisms and other add-on kit, the equipment would require apower source.

The team rejected the idea of using miniature solar panels becausethey would be dependent on available light. So the group decidedto develop a vibration energy collector.

The resulting device consists of a tiny three-layered spiralgenerator.

The outer two layers are made up of PZT-5H - a ceramic substance thatproduces an electrical charge when mechanical stress is applied. Aninner layer of brass provides reinforcement.

Muscle power The researchers used Green June Beetles to determinethe best place to locate the device.

They identified the wings as the most promising power source.

However, the creatures' wing membranes were not rigid orstrong enough to support the device, and it also made them lessaerodynamic. So the team focused, instead, on the animals' wingmuscle.

The engineers ultimately decided to attach two of the spiral beamsto each beetle's thorax. The end of each coil extended out to toucha hardened part of the insect's body close to its wing base whereit could pick up energy.

The two devices weighed less than 0.2 grams and generated 45microwatts of power during flight.

CyborgsThe researchers suggested that the devices could eventually becomethe power source for a race of remote controlled cyborg insects withneural electrodes implants, communications equipment, microphonesand other sensors.

The team suggested the creatures could wear the equipment in tiny"backpacks".

The animals could then be released into dangerous or hard-to-accesslocations after an accident has occurred. The information theygathered could be beamed back to the emergency services to helpprepare a response.

They said the creatures could usher in "a new era forsearch-and-rescue operations, surveillance, monitoring of hazardoussubstances, and detection of explosives".

This is not the first time researchers have tried to work out howto turn animals into remote-controlled automatons.

The report's authors noted experiments to control rats through theparts of their brains related to their whiskers, an attempt to directsharks by stimulating the part of their brain linked to their senseof smell and research into the locomotion control of cockroaches.

As a Merry Christmas to all our readers with thanks for anothergreat year at PT Shamrock, our leprechaun is offering 20% offall products listed at our web site if ordered and payment receivedprior to December 24th, 2011.

Order at https://www.ptshamrock.com/order_bwe.html

We are happy to offer PayPal as another payment method optionfor you.

This offer is for our subscribers only and orders must use the emailaddress used to subscriber to PTBuzz on our newsletter databaseprior to December 14th, 2011. Sorry no exceptions!

In the New Year, may your right hand always be stretched out infriendship but never in want. - Irish Christmas Toast

Through this signage at Promenade Temecula, the mall is notifyingshoppers that their phones may be tracked as they move throughoutthe premises.

Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.

Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, twoU.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and ShortPump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movementsby monitoring the signals from their cell phones.

While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers'paths from store to store.

The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstromshoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers lingerin Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall thataren't being visited?

While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout theirstores, this is the first time they've used cell phones.

But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns.

The management company of both malls, Forest City CommercialManagement, says personal data is not being tracked."We won't be looking at singular shoppers," said StephanieShriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for ForestCity. "The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, likemigrating birds, where people are going to."

Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hangingsmall signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out byturning off their phones.

The tracking system, called FootPath Technology, works through aseries of antennas positioned throughout the shopping center thatcapture the unique identification number assigned to each phone(similar to a computer's IP address), and tracks its movementthroughout the stores.

The system can't take photos or collect data on what shoppers havepurchased. And it doesn't collect any personal details associatedwith the ID, like the user's name or phone number. That informationis fiercely protected by mobile carriers, and often can be legallyobtained only through a court order.

"We don't need to know who it is and we don't need to know anyone'scell phone number, nor do we want that," Shriver-Engdahl said.

Manufactured by a British company, Path Intelligence, thistechnology has already been used in shopping centers in Europe andAustralia. And according to Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar,hardly any shoppers decide to opt out.

"It's just not invasive of privacy," she said. "There are no risksto privacy, so I don't see why anyone would opt out."

Now, U.S. retailers including JCPenney (JCP, Fortune 500) and HomeDepot (HD, Fortune 500) are also working with Path Intelligence touse their technology, Biggar said.

Home Depot has considered implementing the technology but is notcurrently using it any stores, a company spokesman said. JCPenneydeclined to comment on its relationship with the vendor.

Why Apple and Google need to stalk you Some retail analysts saythe new technology is nothing to be worried about. Malls have beentracking shoppers for years through people counters, securitycameras, heat maps and even undercover researchers who followshoppers around. And some even say websites that track onlineshoppers are more invasive, recording not only a user's name andpurchases, but then targeting them with ads even after they've lefta site.

"It's important for shoppers to realize this sort of data is beingcollected anyway," Biggar said.

Whereas a website can track a customer who doesn't make a purchase,physical stores have been struggling to perfect this kind ofresearch, Biggar said. By combining the data from FootPath withtheir own sales figures, stores will have better measurements tohelp them improve the shopping experience.

"We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but noone purchased it," Biggar said. "From there, we can help a retailernarrow down what's going wrong."

But some industry analysts worry about the broader implications ofthis kind of technology.

"Most of this information is harmless and nobody ever does anythingnefarious with it," said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst atForrester Research. "But the reality is, what happens when youstart having hackers potentially having access to this informationand being able to track your movements?"

Last year, hackers hit AT&T, exposing the unique ID numbers ande-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad 3G owners. To make itharder for hackers to get at this information, Path Intelligencescrambles those numbers twice.

Well dear readers, another year is nearing a close. In spite of thedraconian laws with all their menaces that have eroded privacy thisyear, we'd like to end 2011 on a positive note!

More than a hundred PTBuzzer's informed us throughout the yearthey've made their move offshore, both financially and physically,albeit with our humble assistance in some small way.

Congratulations to those who made their exodus. We wish you andyours well, with long life, health and happiest with your new lifeand country.

You can start the New Year off right as well! Be sure to catch ourJanuary 2012 PTBuzz issue. Best-selling author and second passportexpert, Dr. Charles Freeman is in the process of writing a veryspecial report for the January issue, "What It Was Was Freedom!"

Although he's still writing it, the good doctor emailed us a synopsis.And boy.... it knocked our socks off! It will yours too.

It's been a while since the good doctor has written a report forPTBuzz, so we're confident this special report, "What It Was WasFreedom!" will be as good, if not better than his previous ones.

It's sure to help start your New Year on the right foot!

As our way to thank you for another great year at PT Shamrock, andwishing all our readers a Merry Christmas, a safe, prosperous andHappy New Year, our leprechaun is offering 20% off all productslisted at our web site if ordered and payment received prior toDecember 24th, 2011.

This 20% off offer is for our subscribers only and must use theemail address used to subscribe to PTBuzz and be on our newsletterdatabase prior to December 14th, 2011.

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We're going to settle down for a long winter's nap from Christmaseve day until the second week of January 2012..... Sooooo repliesto emails and orders will be made accordingly during theholidays.

'Go mbeire muid beo ar an am seo aras.' - May we be alive at this time next year.

When four of Santa's elves got sick, the trainee elves did notproduce toys as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feelthe pre-Christmas pressure.

Then Mrs. Claus told Santa that her Mother was coming to visit,which stressed Santa even more.

When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of themwere about to give birth, and two others had jumped the fence andwere out, Heaven knows where.

Then, when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboardscracked, the toy bag fell to the ground, and all of the toys werescattered.

Frustrated, Santa went into the house for a cup of apple cider anda shot of rum. When he went to the cupboard, he discovered the elveshad drunk all the cider and had hidden the rum. In his frustration,he accidentally dropped the cider jug, and it broke into hundredsof little glass pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to getthe broom and found the mice had eaten all the straw off the endof the broom.

Just then the doorbell rang, and an irritated Santa marched to thedoor, yanked it open, and there stood a little angel with a greatbig Christmas tree.

The angel said very cheerfully, 'Merry Christmas, Santa. Isn't thisa lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Where would you likeme to stick it?'

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But itcannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is lessformidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. Butthe traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his slywhispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls ofgovernment itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaksin accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face andtheir arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in thehearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretlyand unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city,he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. Amurderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague." - Marcus Tullius Cicero (Ancient Roman Lawyer, Writer, Scholar, Orator and Statesman, 106 BC-43 BC)= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending theUS Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committeeand the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests underthe Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department ofJustice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIAand the National Parks Service to release "all their informationon the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown onOccupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course ofrecent days and weeks."

According to a statement by the NLG, each of the FOIA requestsstates, "This request specifically encompasses disclosure of anydocuments or information pertaining to federal coordination of,or advice or consultation regarding, the police response to theOccupy movement, protests or encampments."

National Lawyers Guild leaders, including Executive Director HeidiBeghosian and NLG Mass Defense Committee co-chair and PCJ ExecutiveDirector Mara Veheyden-Hilliard both told TCBH! earlier this weekthat the rapid-fire assaults on occupation encampments in cities fromOakland to New York and Portland, Seattle and Atlanta, all withindays of each other, the similar approach taken by police, whichincluded overwhelming force in night-time attacks, mass arrests,use of such weaponry as pepper spray, sound cannons, tear gas, clubsand in some cases "non-lethal" projectiles like bean bags and rubberbullets, the removal and even arrest of reporters and camera-persons,and the justifications offered by municipal officials, who all cited"health" and "safety" concerns, all pointed to central directionand guidance.

As the world rises up against economic injustice, Truthout bringsyou the latest news and analysis, free of corporate influence. Helpsupport this work with a tax-deductible donation today.

As we reported, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted publicly in aninterview on a San Francisco radio program earlier this week thatprior to her first order to police to clear Oscar Grant Plaza ofoccupiers on Oct. 25, she had participated in a "conference call"with 17 other urban mayors to discuss strategy for dealing with themovement. At the time of that call, her mayor's office legal advisor,who subsequently resigned over the harsh police tactics used againstdemonstrators, says Quan was, significantly, in Washington, DC.

The NLG says the Occupy Movement, which is now in over 170 citiesaround the U.S., "has been confronted by a nearly simultaneouseffort by local governments and local police agencies to evict andbreak up encampments in cities and towns throughout the country."Veheyden-Hilliard says, "The severe crackdown on the occupationmovement appears to be part of a national strategy," which she saidis designed to "crush the movement," an action she describes as"supremely political."

She adds, "The Occupy demonstrations are not criminal activitiesand police should not be treating them as such."

The police conducting these coordinated raids look more like ImperialStorm Troopers than cops in their riot gear get-ups. The attacksshow how the nation's local police are becoming more of a nationalparamilitary force, curiously akin to the widely despised and fearedArmed Police or Wu Jing who do the heavy riot-control and repressionduty in China. Equipped with federally-supplied body armor andmilitary-style weapons like stun grenades, sound canons and of courseassault rifles, domestic US police forces responding to even gardenvariety, peaceful protest actions often look more like an occupyingarmy than police. Meanwhile their actions have even been condemnedby the Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans who are increasingly comingto and supporting the occupation movement. These vets say the policeare employing tactics that they themselves were not even permittedto use in dealing with unrest in occupied or war-torn lands.

The Guild and other observers strongly suspect that the 72 so-calledFusion Centers created by the Homeland Security Department aroundthe country, and the many Joint Terror Task Forces operated by theFBI in conjunction with local police in many cities, are servingas coordination points for the increasingly systematic attacks onthe Occupy Movement.

It will be instructive to see how the Obama administration and thetargeted agencies respond to the Guild's FOIA requests, and even moreinteresting to see what kinds of documents--if any--are forthcoming.

"We're calling for expedited processing, because this is an urgenteffort, and if we don't get that, we can go to court over thatissue," says Verheyden-Hilliard. "Government delays in respondingdefeat the purpose of an open government law, with people inthe streets and under attack by police now." Normally, she says,government agencies have 20 days to respond to a FOIA request,but with an expedited request the agencies should have to respondeven faster.

National Security and privacy are the only grounds for federalagencies to withhold information sought in a FOIA request, andclearly there is no national security issue involved in this protestmovement, at least not in a strictly legal sense of the term. TheOccupy Movement is protesting economic inequality, and the politicalcorruption that allows the wealthiest people who run the nation'sbiggest banks and companies to run the country in their own interestand to run rough-shod over the broader public interest. Of course,from the perspective of the ruling elite, and from the perspectiveof their political lackeys in the White House and Congress, anyprotest movement calling for a reordering of the political systemto make it more responsive to the public interest would be seen asa national security threat.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Movement is continuing to grow.

Ousted from their base in Zuccotti Park, where a New York statecourt judge has ruled that they can stay, but cannot sleep or bringin sleeping gear or protection from the weather, movement activistsare switching to a decentralized strategy. Some 30,000 people ralliedaround New York City on Thursday (the two-month anniversary of thestart of the Zuccotti occupation), to protest the police action twodays earlier. Some hardy souls still keep Zuccotti occupied roundthe clock, and a General Assembly has been held there several timesdespite police efforts to limit access. Rallies in support of andsolidarity with the New York Occupy Movement were held simultaneouslyin 30 other cities yesterday.

Kenny Clark, 32, dressed in military fatigues he said dated fromhis Army service (he was stationed in Korea) stood in Zuccotti Parkin the pouring rain on Wednesday, more than a day after police hadcleared away the tarps, the 5500-book library, and the free kitchen,and said, with a determined smile, "We're not going away!" A meatcounter worker at A&P, where he has worked for 20 years, Clarksaid he and his co-workers were being asked to take a 20-percentpay cut by the firm, which is using a bankruptcy filing to try andbreak out of its union contracts. "We'll vote down their offer,and then we'll strike, and then they'll probably fire our asses,"he laughed, "but with help from all these occupiers, we'll bemarching in front of their stores and organizing a boycott likethey've never seen! Nobody's going to shop there!"

Clark noted that the Occupy Movement is developing plans for anational occupation of the National Mall, the big park that runsbetween the Capitol and the Lincoln Monument that has been the sceneof many historic rallies and occupations in decades past. A nationalGeneral Assembly is being planned for April 1, which will focus on "the failure of the Democrats and Republicans in Congress to representthe views of the majority of people, the Supreme Court for allowingthe Constitution to be perverted and for ignoring the rule of lawand the Chamber of Commerce and lobbyists on K St for dominatingthe political process in favor of the 1% at the expense of the 99%."

When the gold price hit $1,800/oz., the first thought I had wasn'tto congratulate myself for buying most of what I own for under$400/oz. It was wondering how soon my own gold holdings would makeme a "covered expatriate."

If this sounds like Greek to you, let me explain. Under the U.S. TaxCode a covered expatriate is someone who may have to pay an exittax upon giving up U.S. citizenship or long-term residence, amongother unpleasant consequences.

I'm not yet a covered expatriate, but if gold prices go much higher,I will be. If I subsequently expatriate, I may not only have to payan exit tax but also pay tax on the full value of my IRAs. Plus,as a covered expatriate, I can't make gifts to U.S. persons withoutthe recipient being required to pay a transfer tax up to 35% ifthe value of the gifts exceeds $13,000/year. That rate is slatedto rise to 55% in 2013.

The most common way to become a covered expatriate is to have anet worth that exceeds $2 million. As global central banks createmore and more money out of thin air, anyone who owns a significantquantity of gold will soon meet that threshold.

I'm not ready to expatriate, so I must take the risk of becominga covered expatriate as gold continues to rise. But if you want tosever your responsibility to file U.S. tax and information reportingreturns, and eliminate increasingly onerous restrictions on yourability to live, work, invest, or do business overseas, you mustgive up your U.S. citizenship and passport.

How to Expatriate

There are four steps a U.S. citizen or permanent resident must taketo expatriate:

Step 1. Move your assets to safer havens where there is enhancedprotection for wealth. Some of the most popular wealth havens includeSwitzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria in Europe; Panama and Uruguayin Central and South America; and Hong Kong and Singapore in Asia.

Step 2. Find a residence country that offers greater personalfreedom. These are the countries that you may wish to relocate to inthe future. Or buy property there, "just in case." Popular countriesfor U.S. expats to live in and/or buy property include: Argentina,Belize, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, andUruguay in the Americas; the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Dutchterritories and St. Kitts & Nevis in the Caribbean; Belgium, Cyprus,Malta, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in Europe; and Australia,Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore in Asia.

Step 3. Get another passport. Since the only way U.S. citizenscan legally terminate their obligations to the U.S. governmentis to give up U.S. citizenship and passport, they must obtain asecond passport in order to expatriate. If you don't qualify for asecond passport by naturalization, marriage, or religion, by far thefastest route to obtain one is to purchase one. The Commonwealth ofDominica and the Federation of St. Kitts & Nevis offer citizenshipand passport through a qualifying contribution or investment. Thereare also two EU countries that will award citizenship and passportto individuals who make outstanding contributions to those countries,including financial contributions.

Step 4. Expatriate from the USA. You can accomplish Steps 1-3 whilestill residing in the United States. At this point, you face achoice: to expatriate or not? Expatriation is a radical step. Thereare many complications, beginning with the possibility of paying anexit tax for the privilege of permanently severing your nationalties. There's also the possibility that Congress will eventuallymake expatriation much more difficult. In another decade, perhapsless, the price of expatriation may be to present a balance sheetto the IRS, and give half the number appearing on the bottom lineto Uncle Sam.

10 outlandish things the 'scientific' controllers have in mind foryou in the near future - NaturalNews

What corporate-driven "science" has in mind for the future ofhumanity is far different from the dreamy utopian landscape that'sbeen portrayed by the mainstream media. To hear the corporate-runmedia tell it, science is always "good" for humanity. Scientificachievements are always called "advances" and not "setbacks,"even though many of them have proven to be disastrous for humanity(atomic bombs, for example, or GMOs).

While pure science is, indeed, a necessary component of anycivilization which seeks to expand its understanding of the universe,what we see dominating the landscape today isn't pure science butcorporate-driven "science" that only seeks to accelerate corporateprofits, not human understanding. And with that corporate-slantedscience comes a whole new era of truly terrifying technologies thatwe may soon see become reality in our world.

Here, I've compiled a list of ten future technologies that might beused to strip away your freedoms and enslave you to the corporateglobalist masters, all under the label of "science."

#1) Organ harvesting from genetically modified, patented pigs Need areplacement heart or lung? No worries, mate! Monsanto will grow youa new one using a genetically modified, trans-species pig (patentpending) that was raised on GMO animal feed and subjected to organharvesting while it was still alive in order to keep the organs"fresh."

Your government-approved, Medicare-funded transplant will behandled by one of the top U.S. hospitals, which are, even today,deeply engaged in black market organ trafficking and illegaltransplantations.

#2) "Behavioral vaccines" that rewire your brain to eliminatedissent Disobedience is a disease! And the "cure" for disobedience(or Oppositional Defiance Disorder, as they call it) will be a new"vaccine" that biologically rewires your brain to make you moresocially acceptable to the controllers.

It will be called a "behavioral vaccine" even though, in reality,it's just a chemical lobotomy. This technology will be a cornerstoneof the global police state, which will have no tolerance forindependent thinking or critical thought of any kind, especiallyagainst the state.

#3) Centralized, remote monitoring of all your health statisticsand vital signs by the police state

Think your medical records are really private? Think again: Even now,the U.S. government maintains a secret centralized bank of bloodtaken from children at birth. In the near future, citizens will beimplanted with biometric monitoring chips that relay informationback to the government about your pulse, respiration, and thepresence of either illegal drugs or legalized pharmaceuticals(which are often the very same chemicals as illegal drugs, justre-branded as a medication).

These chips will be used by the government to enforce people takingtheir medications. They will also be used to locate and arrestthose who smoke a little pot or take addictive substances withouta prescription.

But most importantly, these chips will be used to monitor nutritionallevels and make sure no one attains a high level of vitamin D,for example, which promotes clear thinking and strong cognitivefunction (http://www.naturalnews.com/029190_v...). Under scientificdictatorship, the sheeple must be kept in a state of chronicnutritional deficiency in order to be easily controlled. This willall be sold to the public as a way for the government to monitortheir "safety" because, the government will claim, "Too much vitaminD can be dangerous!" So they will set the upper safety limits to thelower threshold of cognitive awakening, making sure that everyoneremains in a mental stupor as they live out their state-run lives.

#4) The total secrecy of all food ingredients, sources and places oforigin As the food industry is increasingly invaded by junk science(GMOs, anyone?), efforts will increase to hide all the chemicalingredients in food products and rename dangerous-sounding chemicalsinto nice-sounding chemicals.

The Corn Refiners Association is already tryingto rename "High Fructose Corn Syrup" to "cornsugar." (http://www.naturalnews.com/029748_h...) Aspartame is nowgoing to be called "AminoSweet," and MSG has been renamed things like"yeast extract" or "Torula yeast powder."

But it's going to get far worse as fraudulent science acceleratesfood industry deceptions. Expect to see preservatives like "sodiumbenzoate" renamed as things like, "Freshiness crystals." Or"artificial colors" might be described as "Fortified with prettycolors."

Above all, the food industry wants to hide where its foods comefrom, how they are made, and what's in them, because all three ofthose categories are bad news for your health.

#5) The complete criminalization of home-produced foods andmedicines, forcing total reliance on factory food production Speakingof food, corrupt "scientists" will soon insist that growing yourown food is extremely dangerous because you might grow e.coliin your garden! With such absurd justifications, home gardeningwill be completely outlawed in many towns, and those who try tosecretly grow tomatoes will be arrested and imprisoned as if theywere heroin smugglers.

The idea of all this is to make the population completely dependenton centralized factory food production, in the same way thepopulation is currently dependent on centralized electricity andcentralized fossil fuels. This will all be justified with the helpof "scientists" who claim that factory-produced food is safer foryou because it's all pasteurized, irradiated and fumigated.

#6) The unleashing of a global bioweapon pandemic through seasonalflu shots Whereas vaccines were once intended to prevent disease,they are now being increasingly weaponized and engineered to spreaddisease, which is why most of the people who get the flu each winterare the very same people who routinely take flu shots.

In the near future, as the globalists decide the world populationhas reached its upper tolerable limit, a live "population control"virus will be engineered right into the vaccines, followed by anaggressive vaccine push that even offers to pay people to receiveflu shots. (Get a flu shot, earn $25!)

The whole scheme, of course, is nothing more than a populationcontrol measure designed to eliminate all the lower-IQ people onthe planet who are stupid enough to allow themselves to be injectedwith biological weapons packaged and sold as vaccines. Effectively,it's really a eugenics program that the globalists believe willsave the human race from the rise of stupidity (no matter what thecost in human suffering).

#7) Total government control over your reproduction and the geneticcode of your "offspring"

Copulating with the person of your choice and producing your own"random" offspring will no longer be allowed under the scientificpolice state. Reproduction must be carefully controlled throughlicensing and regulation to make sure that no unexpected resultsoccur.

Before having children, parents will need to apply to the governmentfor permission to reproduce, at which point they will be geneticallyand cognitively profiled, then granted a reproduction classificationstatus that must be strictly followed to avoid imprisonment.

People who show rebellious tendencies and speak out against the statewill be denied reproduction "privileges." Only the most obedient,white-skinned, do-gooder mind slaves will be granted reproductionprivileges, and they will gladly copulate and raise yet more babiesto be sacrificed to the state as the next generation of mind slaves.

#8) Wireless brain implants that can be remotely activated by lawenforcement to make entire crowds of people passive The future of"science" involves all sorts of electronics implanted into the humanbody. One of the most convenient ones will be the "pacificationchip" that will be forced upon citizens along with "money chips"that they use to pay for everything (cash will be outlawed, andusing cash will be seen as a terrorist activity).

The pacification chip can be remotely activated by the governmentthrough cell tower bursts -- or through hand-held units issued topolice and law enforcement commanders -- to instantly pacify largecrowds of protesters or rioters. Are the students protesting aboutfree speech again? Activate the pacification chip, and they'll alllay down on the lawn and daydream for a while.

Are revolutionaries marching on the capitol and trying to overthrowthe government? Activate the pacification chip, and your tyrannicaldictatorship is safe!

Such chips may also be used to "excite" the brain at times when it isalso politically useful. For example, when another terrorist attackis staged on U.S. soil, the "excitation chips" can be activatedacross the population to get people riled up and calling forwar! (And that's the whole point of false flag attacks, of course.)

In the mean time, the most powerful nations of the world willpour R&D money into growing genetically modified super soldierswho are secretly birthed, raised and trained to be as robotic aspossible. These super soldiers will be genetically engineered withpeak performance attributes (high blood oxygenation, large bodyframes, etc.) combined with small brains that can only processenough information to follow orders but never question them.

They will also be outfitted with numerous electronic implants, makingthem more cyborg than human. They will have vision implants attachedto their retinas, for example, GPS chips wired to their brains,comm equipment wired into their ears, and built-in pain medicationdispensers that flood their bodies with stimulant chemicals so theycan keep fighting even after an arm gets blown off, for example.

#10) The electromagnetic activation of metals and nano-crystalsinjected into you through vaccines Here's a new one most peoplehaven't thought about: In addition to vaccines being used to spreadinfectious disease, they can also be used to inject humans withnano-crystals that are sized and tuned to resonate at certainfrequencies, much like a radio crystal tunes in to a specificradio band.

Such nano-crystals may lie dormant in the bodies of the generalpublic for years or even decades, but at some point the governmentcan take over the radio towers with an "emergency" nationaltransmission that broadcasts an activation signal at precisely theright wavelength to excite the nano-crystals already in peoples'bodies. The results could be anything from mass insanity to massiveoutbreaks of violence (rioting, etc.) or just tens of millionsof people instantly dropping dead. Any of those outcomes couldthen be exploited by the government to sell a cover story of a"terrorist attack" that requires even more government control overthe population.

It could all be done in the name of "science"Remember, this collection of 10 points is about possible futuretechnologies that exemplify the abuse of science to empowertyrannical governments and corrupt industries. Thankfully, theseten examples have not come true yet, but several are well on theirway to become reality in just the next few years.

Real science has an important role to play in any society, butI believe that science should serve the interests of the People,not the self-serving controllers who run globalist corporations andnational governments. When science is used to dominate and enslavepeople rather than setting them free, it is a violation of one ofthe most fundamental truths throughout the universe: only throughfreedom (the freedom of ideas, freedom of questioning, freedom ofdiscussion) can true understanding of our universe be achieved.

Max Blumenthal begins: "Yesterday, the New York Police Departmentdeployed a strange new weapon against the tens of thousands ofdemonstrators who converged downtown for the largest protest inOccupy Wall Street's two month history: the LRAD sound cannon."

Recently the New York Police Department deployed a strange newweapon against the tens of thousands of demonstrators who convergeddowntown for the largest protest in Occupy Wall Street's two monthhistory: the LRAD sound cannon. NYPD officers reportedly blastedOccupy protesters with rays from the LRAD cannon while they sangthe American national anthem near Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park(photos here), establishing an atmosphere of fear and intimidationthat lasted throughout the evening.

Designed and manufactured by the San Diego-based LRAD Corporation,which was formerly known as the American Technology Corporation, theLong Range Acoustic Device sound weapon is the latest innovation incrowd suppression technology. It is portable and powerful, capableof transmitting a focused ray of 140 decibels of sound at a crowdof people, generating painful cranial vibrations so profound earplugs become useless. According to LRAD promotional material,the sonic weapon "provides military personnel with a powerful,penetrating warning tone that can be followed by clear voicebroadcasts in host nation languages to warn and shape the behaviorof potential threats."

In June, LRAD sold $293,000 worth of its 100X and 500X sound canonsystems to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The contract was partof Israeli Army Commander Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi's investment in$35 million in suppression systems in anticipation of widespreadunrest in the occupied West Bank that was to have been prompted bythe Palestinian Authority's statehood bid at the United Nations.

The Israeli Army has refined the use of LRAD systems on the civilianpopulation of Palestinian villages engaged in the unarmed popularstruggle against Israel's illegal military occupation. Demonstratorsin the village of Beit Ummar have been repeatedly assaulted byIsraeli forces armed with LRAD systems, including on October 7,when the Israeli army used the LRAD to attack unarmed demonstratorsprotesting against the abuse and isolation of Palestinian prisonersheld in Israeli jails.

I first visited the Beit Ummar area in the spring of 2009, joining agroup of international and Israeli activists as they protected thevillage's farmers from fanatical Jewish settlers from the colonyof Bat Ayn, who had repeatedly assaulted them as they attemptedto work their fields. As soon as I arrived I witnessed a group ofJewish children from Bat Ayn charge down a hill while chanting,"Death to Arabs!" at the farmers.

In January 2011, settlers shot a Beit Ummar resident, 17-year-oldYousef Fakhri Ikhlayl in the head, leaving him brain dead. Thesettlers could not carry out their deadly violence without theprotection of the Israeli Army, which invariably defends them whilecrushing unarmed protests in Beit Ummar with disproportionate force.

Beit Ummar has carried on its unarmed popular resistance struggleagainst impossible odds. The village has been severed in half bya settler bypass road, Highway 60, which occupied Palestinians areforbidden from traveling on. Numerous graves in the village cemeterywere desecrated in order to build the Israelis-only highway. Notonly are village residents surrounded by army pillboxes and preyed onby extremist settlers, they have been transformed into experimentalgerbils in the global pacification industry's laboratory of doom.

Having been tested on a defenseless, occupied population inPalestine, the LRAD made its grand debut in New York City yesterday,where local police forces targeted American citizens peacefullyprotesting against economic exploitation. The peculiar weaponsystem symbolizes the creeping Israelification of America's localpolice forces and the Palestinianization of all who challenge thepredations of a zero tolerant 1 percent master class.

In recent weeks, Facebook has been wrangling with the Federal TradeCommission over whether the social media website is violating users'privacy by making public too much of their personal information.

Far more quietly, another debate is brewing over a different sideof online privacy: what Facebook is learning about those who visitits website.

Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media gianthas been able to create a running log of the web pages that eachof its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions morenon-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visita Facebook web page for any reason.

To do this, the company relies on tracking cookie technologiessimilar to the controversial systems used by Google, Adobe,Microsoft, Yahoo and others in the online advertising industry,says Arturo Bejar, Facebook's engineering director.

Facebook's efforts to track the browsing habits of visitors to itssite have made the company a player in the "Do Not Track" debate,which focuses on whether consumers should be able to prevent websitesfrom tracking the consumers' online activity.

For online business and social media sites, such information can beparticularly valuable in helping them tailor online ads to specificvisitors. But privacy advocates worry about how else the informationmight be used, and whether it might be sold to third parties.New guidelines for online privacy are being hashed out in Congressand by the World Wide Web Consortium, which sets standards forthe Internet.

If privacy advocates get their way, consumers soon could be empoweredto stop or limit tech companies and ad networks from tracking themwherever they go online. But the online advertising industry has dugin its heels, trying to retain the current self-regulatory system.

Online tracking involves technologies that tech companies and adnetworks have used for more than a decade to help advertisers delivermore relevant ads to each viewer. Until now, Facebook, which makesmost of its profits from advertising, has been ambiguous in publicstatements about the extent to which it collects tracking data.

It contends that it does not belong in the same camp asGoogle, Microsoft and the rest of the online ad industry's majorplayers. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made this point to interviewerCharlie Rose on national TV last week.

For the past several weeks, Zuckerberg and other Facebook officialshave sought to distinguish how Facebook and others use trackingdata. Facebook uses such data only to boost security and improve how"Like" buttons and similar Facebook plug-ins perform, Bejar told USATODAY. Plug-ins are the ubiquitous web applications that enable youto tap into Facebook services from millions of third-party web pages.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes says the company has "no plans tochange how we use this data." He also says the company's intentions"stand in stark contrast to the many ad networks and data brokersthat deliberately and, in many cases, surreptitiously track peopleto create profiles of their behavior, sell that content to thehighest bidder, or use that content to target ads."

Conflicting pressures Rather than appease its critics, Facebook'spublic explanations of how it tracks and how it uses trackingdata have touched off a barrage of questions from technologists,privacy advocates, regulators and lawmakers around the world.

"Facebook could be tracking users without knowledge or permission,which could be an unfair or deceptive business practice," saysRep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., co-sponsor with Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas,of a bill aimed at limiting online tracking of children.The company "should be covered by strong privacy safeguards," Markeysays. "The massive trove of personal information that Facebookaccumulates about its users can have a significant impact on them -now and into the future."

Noting that "Facebook is the most popular social media website in theworld," Barton adds, "All websites should respect users' privacy."

After Zuckerberg appeared on the Charlie Rose TV show last week,Markey and Barton sent a letter to the 27-year-old CEO asking himto explain why Facebook recently applied for a U.S. patent fortechnology that includes a method to correlate tracking data withadvertisements. They gave Zuckerberg a Dec. 1 deadline to reply.

It must prove to its global financial backers that it is worthy ofthe hundreds of millions of dollars they've poured into the company,financial and tech industry analysts say. Those investors includeMicrosoft, Goldman Sachs, the Russian investment firm DigitalSky Technologies, Hong Kong financier Sir Ka-shing Li and venturecapitalist Peter Andreas Thiel.

The success of the company's initial public offering of stock,expected sometime next year, hinges in part on Facebook's ability tomove beyond the bread-and-butter text ads that appear on members'home pages and emerge as a key player in graphical display ads andcorporate brand marketing campaigns, says Rebecca Lieb, advertisingmedia analyst at the Altimeter Group.

To meet rising expectations, Facebook must increase its annualrevenue, now estimated at about $4 billion, by double-digitpercentage points for years to come, Gluck says. The company isstriving to keep its options open to do this. In doing so, it isbumping into pressure from critics who are concerned that leavingonline privacy standards entirely in the hands of corporationsmight not be the best idea.

Last week, consumer reporter Ric Romero of station KABC in LosAngeles showed how insurance companies monitor Facebook and Twitter,looking for reasons to raise premiums and deny claims. Previously,ABC News reporter Lyneka Little reported on how employers useFacebook information as part of the recruitment process.

Meanwhile, researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester PolytechnicInstitute have documented how tracking data culled from Internetsearches and surfing can be meshed with personal information thatInternet users disclose at websites for shopping, travel, healthor jobs. Personal disclosures made on social networks, along withpreference data gathered by new apps for smartphones and tablet PCs,are being tossed into this mix, too.

Privacy advocates worry that before long, corporations, governmentagencies and political parties could routinely purchase trackingdata from data aggregators.

"Tracking data can be used to figure out your political bent,religious beliefs, sexuality preferences, health issues or the factthat you're looking for a new job," says Peter Eckersley, technologyprojects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Thereare all sorts of ways to form wrong judgments about people."

So far, it does not appear that this sort of data correlation isbeing done, at least not on a wide scale. But in the absence ofground rules, technologists, regulators and privacy advocates worrythat companies involved in collecting tracking data could succumbto the temptation to cash in.

Says Michael Fertik, founder and CEO of Reputation.com: "We canonly imagine that an advertising company with a richer trove ofdata will sell more and more of that data."

Facebook's trove of data

Facebook for the first time revealed details of how it compiles itstrove of tracking data in a series of phone and e-mail interviewsconducted by USA TODAY with Bejar, Noyes and Schnitt, as well asengineering manager Gregg Stefancik and corporate spokeswoman JaimeSchopflin. Here's what they disclosed:

* The company compiles tracking data in different ways for memberswho have signed in and are using their accounts, for members whoare logged-off and for non-members. The tracking process beginswhen you initially visit a facebook.com page. If you choose tosign up for a new account, Facebook inserts two different types oftracking cookies in your browser, a "session cookie" and a "browsercookie." If you choose not to become a member, and move on, youonly get the browser cookie.

* From this point on, each time you visit a third-party webpage thathas a Facebook Like button, or other Facebook plug-in, the plug-inworks in conjunction with the cookie to alert Facebook of the date,time and web address of the webpage you've clicked to. The uniquecharacteristics of your PC and browser, such as your IP address,screen resolution, operating system and browser version, are alsorecorded.

* Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visitsfor 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day andadding the newest to this log.

If you are logged-on to your Facebook account and surfing theWeb, your session cookie conducts this logging. The session cookieadditionally records your name, e-mail address, friends and all dataassociated with your profile to Facebook. If you are logged-off, orif you are a non-member, the browser cookie conducts the logging;it additionally reports a unique alphanumeric identifier, but nopersonal information.

Bejar acknowledged that Facebook could learn where specific membersgo on the Web when they are logged off by matching the unique PCand browser characteristics logged by both the session cookie andthe browser cookie.

He emphasized that Facebook makes it a point not to do this. "We've said that we don't do it, and we couldn't do it without someform of consent and disclosure," Bejar says.

Bejar also acknowledged "technical similarities" in the cookie-basedtracking technologies used by Facebook and the wider onlineadvertising industry. "But we're not like ad networks at all in ourstewardship of the data, in the way we use it, and the way we layeverything out," Bejar says. "We have a very clear and transparentapproach to how we do advertising that I'm very proud of."

Even so, Facebook's public descriptions of its tracking systemshave not satisfied some critics - particularly European privacyregulators. Ilse Aigner, Germany's minister of consumer protection,last month banned Facebook plug-ins from government websites andadvised private companies to do the same.

And Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner in the German stateof Schleswig-Holstein, expressed alarm at how Facebook's technologycould potentially be used to build extensive profiles of individualWeb users.

"Whoever visits Facebook or uses a plug-in must expect that he orshe will be tracked by the company for two years," Weichert saidin a statement. "Such profiling infringes German and European dataprotection law."

Noyes says Germany doesn't understand how the company's trackingtechnologies work. And he blames "software bugs" for theindiscriminate tracking discovered by Roosendaal and Cubrilovic.

"When we were made aware that certain cookies were sending moreinformation to us than we had intended, we fixed our cookiemanagement system," Noyes says.

However, researcher Roosendaal says Facebook's tracking cookiesretain the capacity to extensively track non-members and logged-offmembers alike. "They have been confronted with the same issue nowseveral times and every time they call it a bug. That's not reallycontributing to earning trust."

Some corporate security executives have become concerned aboutcybercriminals getting hold of tracking data relayed by Like buttons,then using that intelligence to steal intellectual property. They'veasked firewall supplier Palo Alto Networks to identify and blocktraffic from Facebook tracking cookies, while enabling theiremployees to continue using other Facebook services.

In a world in which nearly anyone can purchase a device capable ofphotographing locations behind walls, gates and fences, will anyonebe able to keep a secret? - John Villasenor

Technology, as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a2001 Supreme Court opinion, has the power "to shrink the realm ofguaranteed privacy." Few other technologies have as much power todo this as drones. Because they can perch hundreds or thousandsof meters in the air, drones literally add a new dimension tothe ability to eavesdrop. They can see into backyards and intowindows that look out onto enclosed spaces not visible from thestreet. They can monitor wi-fi signals or masquerade as mobilephone base stations, intercepting phone calls before passing themalong. Using a network of drones, it would be possible to followthe movements of every vehicle in a city-a capability that wouldbe invaluable to a police department tracking the getaway car ina bank robbery but invasive if used to track a patient driving toa clinic to get treatment for a confidential medical condition.

The growth in nonmilitary use of drones is too recent to havegenerated a significant body of legal precedents specificallyaddressing their implications with respect to privacy. Butclosely related legal cases and evolving legal and societalstandards regarding privacy make it clear that the issue will becomplex. For example, in 1986 the United States Supreme Court ruledthat law enforcement's use of a private plane to view otherwisehidden marijuana plants growing in a California backyard did notconstitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment right of freedom fromunreasonable search and seizure. The reason? The police observationswere made from "public navigable airspace." This might be interpretedto suggest that the owners of drones operated in public airspacewill enjoy broad latitude to use them for surveillance in the U.S.

However, drone-based surveillance that is sustained, extensiveor systematic enough will at some point almost certainly runafoul of privacy rights, although determining when that point isreached will not be easy. Privacy rights are a complex and evolvingpatchwork. In the U.S., for example, the right to privacy is foundnot only through a combination of constitutional amendments, butalso in additional protections in some state constitutions andlaws. In Europe Article Eight of the European Convention on HumanRights provides an explicit right to "respect for private and familylife." An additional challenge to predicting the impact of drones onprivacy is that the regulations that govern where, by whom, underwhat circumstances, and what altitudes drones may be used are influx. In the U.S., for example, the Federal Aviation Administrationhas been working to develop new policies governing the use of smallUAVs, and is aiming to publish proposed rules in the near future.

Regardless of the details of the eventual regulations adopted bythe FAA and by analogous agencies in other countries, drones arecertain to have a profound impact on privacy for the simple reasonthat they make it easy and inexpensive to gather massive amounts ofinformation from above. Ryan Calo of the Center for Internet andSociety at Stanford Law School has suggested that the widespreaduse of drones may in fact benefit privacy law by generating abacklash that will result in increased privacy protections. Evenif this occurs, however, it is unclear what forms these new privacyprotections might take, and how they would be balanced against themany beneficial uses of information that drones can acquire.

The tech industry giants continue to dutifully "lead the way" intoa suffocating surveillance state in collusion with the nasty likesof the NSA, FBI, CIA, TSA and the DHS..to name a "phew". (Almostran out of letters. Notice they're almost always 3?...hmmm. TheMasons wouldn't have anything to do with all this, would they?)This time a "non-profit group Parking Mobility, created by GeorgeSoros-funded organizations, created the Android, Blackberry andiPhone parking ticket app which encourages cities to adopt theprogram because they can "generate revenue." As if our well-beingwas the purpose for this indoctrination into self-policing. Imean, c'mon.

Deputizing Citizens As Parking Meter Snitches? There's An AppFor That

Residents of Austin, Texas may soon have the power to issue parkingtickets by taking a few photographs of someone else's car with theirsmartphones. A unanimous council voted on October 20 to explorethe concept of deputizing vigilante meter maids using an iPhoneapp. Disabled advocates pushed the program at the council meetingin the hopes of guaranteeing easier parking. They were joined byothers who were just interested in writing the $511 tickets.

The system requires a person take three photographs of the allegedviolator -- one of the license plate, one of the windshield andone showing the car and the handicapped parking sign. The softwaresends the photos and the GPS location to the city so it can issuethe expensive ticket.

Since a big run at installing a ramped up snitch program last year,they seem to have since concentrated on spyware technology due tothe blow back they got. But this clever re-introduction via the"handicapped" in an attempt to get it into every city under theguise of an income generator is pretty damn devious.

However it is taking its toll on the innocent. If you follow thenews you'll examples continually of people using the

The Snitch Rollout

If you remember, last December we had a major snitch programroll-out. Walmart started running the DHS "If you see something saysomething" campaign which continues to leak into the social fabric,YouTube installed a Terror Alert Tag, and then Apple of course joinedin as the first to publish this Nazi throwback Patriot App--just aspatriotic as its predecessor, the freedom-extinguishing Patriot Act.

This was all on the heels of the first WikiLeaks uproar. Hmm. Funnyhow they had these programs ready to roll out. Wonder what they'lluse for the next crank up? Watch for it.

This Should Be Fun... Not

With these types of self-policing surveillance tools now anyoneand everyone can "become someone" and "make a difference protectingour nation's security."

Right.

As these programs continue to escalate they're eventually going totrigger a firestorm of fear and confusion, all part of the plan. Justimagine how much havoc can be wreaked with false information andrandom accusations--for which snitchers will be praised for being"great Americans". With as much TV as most Americans watch, they'regonna want to be armchair Jack Bauers or CSI agents.

The channel is now wide open. Wanna get back at your boss? Yourex? Your kids' teachers? Students who don't like their teachers?

Teachers who don't like their students? Wanna get back at Momand Dad? How about that long haired protester you keepseeing at the grocery store? Or let's look around the Internetfor views I don't like or agree with. "It's payback time for youweirdos! Extremists! Right wing nut job! Left wing wacko! Centristcompromiser! Social deviant! Dirty Occupier" etc. etc.

However it is taking its toll on the innocent. If you follow thenews you'll examples continually of people using the" It's all fair game in a self-policing police state."

And they're itching to see the snitching fully in place. Remembertheir otto, "Ordo Ab Chao".

Set confusion afoot and you get your dirty work done in the shadowswhile they call on you for help to finish it off.

And it's all at the click of a mouse---or should I say....rat....

Snitching For Fun and Profit

The way the laws have been eroded, you're now guilty until proveninnocent and can be held indefinitely under Patriot Acts 1 and 2and a host of other anti-Constitutional laws, mandates and executiveorders, known and unknown.

On top of that all it takes is an accusation, bona fide or not. Howeasy is it for virtual agent provocateurs to stir up a storm overanyone they want to target. Once accused, job done. As the world'seconomies continue to crumble, they won't have to pay much to hirea horde of snitches.

Nasty Effects Already Felt - Due Process Almost Gone

All this "rat and snitch" empowerment is taking its toll on theinnocent. Besides training people to fear and suspect everyonearound them and to toe the line themselves lest they be reported on,if you follow the news you'll see examples continually of peopleabusing these new self-policing "tools".

Our freedoms are being eroded quickly, and all in the name of"security" and by getting us to police each other.

False Accusations of Sexual Harassment May Soar, SAVE Warns

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The National Associationof Scholars recently released a position paper condemning anEducation Department[] directive that forces colleges to removefundamental due process protections from persons accused of sexualharassment. The statement describes the Dept. of Education mandateas "ominous," bordering on the "surreal," and excluding any mentionof free speech. Source Next "Event" Will Trigger Even More

Obama said early on he wants to create an army of brown shirttype youth to help enforce this tyranny of fear. Wouldn't anotherengineered "event" be an opportune time to ramp up such a program? He may be down in the ratings, but not for long after the nextfalse flag, you just watch.

1984 excerpt summary:Winston opens the door fearfully, assuming that the Thought Policehave arrived to arrest him for writing in the diary. However, itis only Mrs. Parsons, a neighbor in his apartment building, needinghelp with the plumbing while her husband is away. In Mrs. Parsons'sapartment, Winston is tormented by the fervent Parsons children, who,being Junior Spies, accuse him of thoughtcrime. The Junior Spiesis an organization of children who monitor adults for disloyaltyto the Party, and frequently succeed in catching them-Mrs. Parsonsherself seems afraid of her zealous children.

Cranking Up The Spyware

They haven't been quiet on the surveillance front. The snitchprogram may seem to have toned down since the uproar against it,but it certainly hasn't slowed down on the technological side. Here'sa quick overview of a few ways Big Brother is watching:12 Ways We're Being Eyeballed, Indexed and Monitored to Oblivion:

1. Credit/Debit and RFID use: Every transaction, ID and passport useis monitored and tracked. Your buying habits are sold to corporationsand your personal information given to the US Department of Justicein some form. Rely on it. Your privacy rights have vanished. RFIDsare soon to be in all forms of ID, used for medical records,are in your food and products for "tracking" and soon to be undereveryone's skin. Beware. That one's a biggie.2. Phone and Internet use. Forget it, they know everything. TheNSA is in bed with the servers and providers so kiss internet andcellular privacy goodbye, subjects. Don't believe that? Go googlingbefore it disappears.3. GPS and Drones. "Thanks for the self-bought tracking device,Philbert." They can pinpoint anyone. GPS, phone, lowjack,OnStar...those just help. Watch for the policing drones and othertechnologies to follow soon. You are not alone...anywhere!4. Smart Meters. They read all your home's devices, track youractivities and give off more radiation than a cell phone tower! Nice,eh? Clever bastards.5. Chemtrails and EMFs. By now we've all inhaled, eaten and drunkenough barium, and aluminum, to be tracked from space. EMFs fromcell and GWEN towers screw with your nervous system more than everand influence your thoughts, as does your TV. Happy yet?6. The Obvious CCTV cameras...and the Not Obvious ones. In the UKthey're IN the buses as well as outside the buses...never mind intrees in the countryside! Yes, it's gone that far, and will in theUS soon too. Smile. There's 8 to 12 every intersection...don't youwonder the hell why?7. Scans and More Scans. Old news. Airport, transport, mobileand soon to be everywhere: Metal detectors, feel-downs and ups,and the latest: backscatter machines that unzip your DNA! Gettingthe picture?8. Fingerprints and Iris scanners. Notice how many want fingerprintsnow? And iris scanners are already in place in many airports,in fact I've heard this is the first thing the NYPD is doing toanyone arrested at OWS. Beware.9. Facial recognition technology. "Yay! We'll catch all thosebuggers now! But why am I suspect?" Coming "officially" in January(which means they've been experimenting and using it for some timealready.....) and..10. Precrime detection! Yes, movies DO come to life! They're workingfervently on detecting your MOOD and will summarily assume at willyou have BAD INTENTIONS with this one! Beware being pissed or ona bummer in public...YOU could be a terrorist!!11. Intention To Trespass Outside the Country? Yup. Here's a brandnew doozey. "You gonna circumvent your domesticating home country'slaws on substance regulation, you wild and crazy thing? Damnyou...you get back in the house right now!"12. "Illuminating!" - Intellistreets coming soon! New streetlights that include "Homeland Security" applications includingspeaker systems, motion sensors and video surveillance are nowbeing rolled out with the aid of government funding. Orwell wouldbe proud. (Go Here)

Fascism On SteroidsSome call this fascist clamp down the fourth Reich, but it mightas well be the third Reich since it never really stopped--it justchanged faces and moved to the US where they could take it to newlevels. And we're still only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Can that happen here? It already has. We're almost completelydisempowered while the laws are all in place just waiting for thenext excuse to keep ratcheting it up.Disempowered?

By thinking our votes make any kind of a difference and submittingto a system that tells us we can only go through those channels. Bytaking instructions from a compromised media. By waiting forresponsible leaders to come to the fore in a completely corruptsystem. By not believing it could happen here, as was the case inevery country that was ever taken over by despotic powers. By hidingin our religions and believing we'll only get out of this when the"cavalry" appears.

Lots of reasons.

All while people still put money in their banks, pay tribute tothem, buy their polluted products and drink in their sewage in themedia. And most pitifully, while sacrificing their kids for furtherindoctrination and drugging in a diabolical school system designedto further degrade the human race. It's pitiful.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

TSA thugs, Homeland Security and their ilk look the same now asthey did not that long ago--but how soon we forget. Or shouldI say, how quickly they take true history out of our collectiveconsciousness--not hard in the world's dumbed-down state.

How'd it happen?

As the line goes,

Question: "What do you think about all this epidemic of ignoranceand apathy?"Answer: "I don't know and I don't care!"

"Hey, snappy uniforms, good benefits....and I guess this ispatriotic...and WE won't get in trouble, only them. Talk aboutgreat job security in scary times!"

When the lights of the world dim and seem to go out, the true lightof awakened humanity shines brighter and brighter. Realizing whatis really going on and detaching from this tyrannical empire inevery way possible and helping others to do the same is the livingsolution.

They're nothing to fear. They ARE fear itself and living in itsgrip with an insecure need to dominate others. Don't be fooled.

At the Techonomy conference in Tucson this week, Mike Lynch, chiefexecutive of Autonomy, riveted the audience - not with a taleof how he recently sold his Cambridge, Britain-based company toHewlett-Packard for more than $10 billion, but how a fundamentaladvance in technology could destroy privacy.

He wasn't talking about how online software monitors people's Websurfing habits. He was talking about people's movements in thereal world.

In the past, Lynch said, people could count on a certain levelof secrecy and anonymity even in public spaces monitored by videocameras "because there was no one to watch them." The cameras weredumb devices, incapable of recognizing what passed in front oftheir lenses.

"We're about to hit a fundamentally different situation," Lynchsaid. Thanks to advances in software from companies such as Autonomy,devices can "start to understand the information" they collectthrough their lenses "and put it together." The eventual casualtywill be "your ability to do anything without it being known."

That's hyberbolic, but he offered an example that was bothreasonable-sounding and chilling. You and several of yourlocal Facebook friends could download an application onto yoursmartphones that reads the license plates of the cars that pass yourlocations. Voila, "you can track anybody moving around your city."

"There are going to be sensors everywhere," Lynch added, noting theproliferation of sophisticated smartphones that see, hear and detecttheir location. What protected people in the past was the inabilityto make sense of all that voluminous data. "Now, there's not goingto be that limitation. It's going to be a very different world."

He went on to offer a demonstration of a far more benign use of aniPad's video camera, a variation on the typical augmented realityapp. The latter typically relies on barcodes or other visible symbolsas triggers, but Lynch said his app automatically recognizes abouthalf a million objects - no symbols needed.

When pointed at a poster of a movie, the app replaced the imagewith an clickable video advertisement. When trained on the frontpage of a newspaper, it inserted a video of an updated story. "Acompletely boring non-interactive object becomes an interactive one,"Lynch declared.

"The thing is continually looking around to see if there's stuffit can recognize," he added. "As the processing speed goes up,we can deal with information in completely different ways."

That's cool in the benign context. But it's easy to see how itcould be creepy or, worse, suppressive.

Best Buy is named in a recently filed lawsuit over customer privacyissues.

As shoppers prepare for Black Friday and the Christmas season, a PalmBeach County law firm has filed suit against Best Buy Best Buy Latestfrom The Business Journals In-N-Out buys land for Lake Worth site,plans constructionWieden Super Bowl Coke ad possibleBlack Friday:Movies, giveaways, laser shows, maybe some shopping Follow thiscompany, alleging it collects information from drivers' licenseswhen customers make returns.

The act, or DPPA, is a federal statute that protects the privacy ofpersonal information assembled by state motor vehicles departments.

The lawsuit alleges Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) has established a businesspractice of swiping drivers' licenses and storing the information.

Receipts provided during returns state that "some of the informationfrom your ID may be stored in a secure, encrypted database ofcustomer activity that Best Buy and its affiliates use to trackexchanges and returns."

The suit, which seeks class action status on behalf of an unknownnumber of customers, alleges that Best Buy's retention of datais not "use in the normal course of business" as described by thefederal law.

A spokeswoman for Best Buy said the company doesn't comment onlitigation.

According to attorney Greg Weiss with Leopold-Kuvin, Best Buy'spractice goes beyond what is allowed.

"They are taking all the information, and storing it in adatabase. They could just have the cashier look at it. Nothing inthe statute authorizes storing the information," Weiss said.

In addition, Weiss said he is uncertain what Best Buy means by theword "affiliates" and wonders if that could mean other store chains.

Weiss said Siegler contacted the firm after he made a return atBest Buy's Boynton Beach store. According to the suit, Siegler wassurprised that the clerk swiped his drivers' license.

Most lawsuits under the DPPA have been directed at merchants whosell personal information, but Weiss said he's not accusing theretailer of that.

Your newsletter is essential reading for anyone that has thesmallest concern about what is happening to their freedoms intoday's unfriendly world.

You have proven yourself to be honest, reliable and trustworthy overthe many years I have been a loyal customer and faithful subscriber[to PTBuzz.]

Happy Holidays to you all and the leprechaun.

R.P.

Dear Shamrock:

I am pleased to read in your "letters to the editor" email's frompersons who are critical of, or are contrary to your views. Kudosto you.

George M.

Dear Shamrock:

I Live in XXXXX and wanted to talk to one of your Staff regardinga banking problem I have.

My Contact Tel, No is XXXXXXXXX or Mobile: XXXXXXXXX

Many thanks

E

Dear E:

Thanks for yours.

We are not your typical walk in off the street, call on the telephonetype of operation.

Due to insecure governments and the nature of our products, reportsand services, we do not receive nor make telephone calls or acceptwalk-ins for ordering, information or other purposes. For yourpersonal privacy and security, as well as ours, please respectthis policy. For secure communications use pgp, secure encryptede-mail. You can download various versions of pgp at www.pgpi.org. Ourpgp key is located at: http://www.ptshamrock.com/dss-key.html

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Dear Shamrock:

"Some users might be disturbed, but what would they expect?" Oldsasked. "The info they post online is essentially in the public domainin most cases and it's easy to understand why the government wouldlook for any edge they can find vs. terrorists."

The problem is that anyone who disagrees with government or its oftenquestionable policies is now classified as a potential "terrorist"9/11 is the greatest boost this proto-fascist government ever had.

Thanks for being there.

CD

Dear Shamrock:

I am very impressed with all the stuff you manage to cover and amstarting to rely more and more on the info you provide.

If possible, please let me have some info regarding safe tax'friendly' places as I am currently banking in Panama.

Best wishes,

OPT

Dear Shamrock:

Thank you very much for your very informative response.

I believe I am more or less clear already what would most likelybe involved with this endeavor.

I agree that the intrinsic value that we will get at the end,far outweighs any initial expense and effort.

Thank you for being clear and upfront about what you can and can'toffer to assist. I will discuss this with my wife and we will surelymove on with it.

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"The right to privacy is a part of our basic freedoms. Privacyis fundamental to close family ties, competitive free enterprise,the ownership of property, and the exchange of ideas."